Online booking is booming for tourism brands. Travel market research company Phocuswright projects that by 2026, nearly 65% of global travel gross bookings will be made online, reaching a valuation of $1.2 trillion.
In 2024, US online travel agencies (OTAs) generated $108.5 billion in gross bookings, with their market share remaining steady through 2028. But there is a big gap between high-volume distribution and high-value ownership: Rely too heavily on intermediaries, and you create a “platform tax” that erodes margins and keeps you from owning the guest relationship.
That’s why it’s important to shift your strategy from renting customers via OTAs to acquiring them through your own booking platform.
In this guide, find out today's trending tourism website imperatives for growing enterprise businesses like yours. Learn the ins and outs of how to navigate the shift toward direct bookings, hyperpersonalization, and unified commerce to reclaim your margins.
The digital battleground: Direct booking vs. distribution
Every tourism brand faces the same dilemma: How much can you truly rely on metasearch engines like Expedia and Airbnb? Those OTA platforms bring the volume, but they charge a premium for the customer acquisition.
Looking ahead, the strategy isn’t to leave them behind entirely, but to stop paying rent for every customer relationship.
The cost of indirect sales
Consider the platform tax for operating only on OTAs: Between 2022 and 2024, Expedia Group’s revenue margin sat at 12.3% of gross bookings, as per its SEC filing. Airbnb’s take rate in late 2024 was even higher, hovering around 14.1%. These platforms charge commissions and service fees that vary, forcing you to charge customers a higher price to make a profit.
Google’s hotel ads also changed in 2024, moving from a cost-per-action (CPA) model to cost-per-click (CPC). Now, you pay the bill even if customers don’t book. That makes having a high-converting ecommerce website even more important to your bottom line.
If you're paying for traffic, you need to capture it. Tools like Shop Pay can lift conversion by up to 50% compared to a standard guest checkout, turning more browsers into bookers. Apps like Sesami can then handle the scheduling seamlessly.
Overall, OTAs are renting you customers, and direct booking is you building a client list.
| Feature | OTA / Marketplace | Direct Booking |
|---|---|---|
| Fees | Can run anywhere from 10%–30% on average | About 3% for processing fees |
| The Hidden Cost | You often get a masked email and zero long-term contact info. You can’t market to them again for free. | You manage the website, booking engine, and payment connection yourself. |
| Cash Flow | Payouts can happen after the guest checks in or weeks later. | Funds hit your account within days of the transaction. |
| Cancellation Risk | Shoppers are trained to book multiple options and cancel later because it’s risk-free on platforms. | Guests who book directly tend to be more committed to their plans. |
Winning the direct booking saves you the commission fee, and also gives you the customer data to invite them back without paying for the introduction twice. The minute your marketing costs drop below OTA fees, start moving customers to your own site.
The mobile imperative
Smartphones are now the main way people book travel. If your mobile experience feels like a shrunken version of your desktop site, you’re losing revenue to the giants who optimize every pixel for the thumb.
The data backs this up: 54% of nights booked on Airbnb came through its mobile app in Q1 2024. Booking Holdings (which owns Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, and OpenTable) reports nearly half of room nights were booked via mobile apps in 2023.
Travelers have voted with their screens. They expect native-app speed and zero friction. If a page loads slowly or a form asks for too many details, they abandon the cart and return to the OTAs they trust.
To create these experiences, you don’t need to allocate engineering resources to building payment flows. Shopify’s Checkout Kit allows your app to hand off the transaction to Shopify’s one-page checkout. You get the brand control of a custom app with the conversion power of a world-class platform.
Trend 1: Hyper-personalized, holistic digital servicing
One thing all trending travel and tourism websites have in common is personalized shopping experiences. Travel brands are hyperpersonalizing their websites in various ways to attract customers with tailored offers.
The demand for experiential travel
Whether it’s a recovery retreat or a deep dive into local culture, the experience is the product. The room is just a place for travelers to sleep between adventures.
It’s not a vibe shift, but an economic movement. The Global Wellness Institute projects that wellness tourism will surpass $1 trillion in 2024, reaching $1.4 trillion by 2027.
Meanwhile, the old loyalty routine is failing. A 2025 survey found that 68% of travelers now prefer hotels that deliver personalized experiences over points-based rewards. For Gen Z, that number jumps to 83%.
To meet travelers in the moment, you can:
- Sell the experience up front. Don't wait for the post-stay email to offer the good stuff. If wellness is driving the spend, make the recovery treatment, culinary workshop, or dark-sky tour bookable in the same flow as the room with Shopify Bundles.
- Simplify the add-on. Use the data your guests give you. If a visitor spends time on your spa pages, pitch them a recovery bundle that includes a late checkout and a sunrise hike. Booking.com notes that travelers are actively seeking these "alternative itineraries" that reflect their interests.
- Market to individuals. A family reunion planner has different needs than a solo wellness traveler. Customer segmentation tools let you build specific audiences—like “first-time” versus “repeat,” or “wellness-seeking”—and target them with personalized content and offers across email and your site.
AI-driven recommendation engines
Gone are the days of endlessly tweaking filters for each trip you’re planning. Leading travel brands are building entire itineraries for guests so they never need to click the “4 stars or higher” checkbox again.
Expedia’s Spring 2024 release is a great example. The company now offers personalized results with a Personalized Itinerary Builder and Romie, an AI travel buddy that actively tailors trip plans based on user context.
Similarly, IHG Hotels & Resorts announced a generative AI planner in their app, built with Google Cloud. The AI planner delivers personalized recommendations rather than simple room lists.
These AI advancements aren’t tech companies showing off—they’re what modern consumers expect. A global BCG study from December 2024 found that most consumers expect personalized experiences, while approximately 80% are comfortable receiving them.
The goal is to make digital planning feel as natural as a conversation with a travel agent would’ve been back in the day. Marriott’s Homes & Villas, for instance, launched a tool that lets travelers search using natural language. Instead of checking boxes for “pool” and “3 bedrooms,” you can describe the trip you want, and the engine recommends matching homes and destinations based on what you say.
When you run your own direct booking tourism website on Shopify, you can customize the kinds of AI-powered tools that make the most sense for your travel business. For example, if you are selling a luxury villa or a unique retreat, static photos can fall flat. Shopify’s support for 3D models and augmented reality (AR) apps lets guests virtually walk through a room or venue before they book, reducing purchase hesitation.
The Shopify App Store is also filled with AI-driven personalization tools. Nosto is one such app: It can recommend add-ons, tailor email marketing based on browsing history, and automate concierge-style chat support on your site.
Building trust through digital proof
It used to be that folks trusted family and friends for travel recommendations. That is still true, but the social media feed is playing a bigger role every year. According to Amadeus, social media has now overtaken friends and family as the top source of inspiration for US travelers.
Expedia Group’s 2025 Traveler Value Index also found that 61% of travelers get trip ideas from social platforms, and 73% say influencer recommendations have actively influenced a booking decision.
Accor became the first hotel group to launch TikTok’s Dynamic Travel Ads globally. By leaning into creator-style formats, they reported 1.8x more hotel bookings compared to their standard web conversion ads.
On a boutique level, Le Monastère des Augustines ran an influencer program focused on wellness content. Influencers were invited to experience a stay at the Monastère and discover the services, then post about it online—and the program generated over 300,000 impressions.
If you’re not already doing it, it’s time to more deeply integrate the social media experience into your brand strategy. Don't let the discovery happen on TikTok and hope the user remembers to Google you later. You can also embed short-form video and creator quotes directly on your room or activity pages to encourage visitors to book.
Trend 2: Unified commerce and accelerated conversion
There is a lot of data to collect about a guest. Their folio usually spans dining, spa treatments, retail purchases, and offsite excursions. To make that complex web of transactions feel simple for your guests, a single commerce brain that connects your website to your property is key. That’s where unified commerce comes in.
Seamless checkout optimization
The most friction-filled part of travel is often the process of paying for it. Travelers prioritize speed and familiarity, and they have little patience for a clunky checkout experience.
While 79% of travelers still cite the ability to use credit or debit cards as a priority, digital wallet usage surged to 28% in 2025. If you force a guest to thumb-type a 16-digit credit card number on a slow mobile form, they leave.
The good news is that a leading independent study found that Shopify’s checkout converts up to 36% better than the competition on average. Even just the presence of our accelerated checkout option, Shop Pay, can boost lower-funnel conversion by 5%.
Your brand’s checkout experience also needs to be relevant to local markets. Shopify Payments, for example, lets you configure payment methods by country. That way, you can offer the options your guests trust, like Apple Pay, Google Pay, iDEAL, or Bancontact, without a complex integration.
Finally, for high-value bookings or packages, flexibility is key. According to a 2025 report from NerdWallet, nearly one in five US travelers planned to use a buy now, pay later (BNPL) service for summer vacations in 2025. Using Shop Pay Installments allows you to capture that demand online and in-store, reducing the sticker shock of a dream trip.
Integrating the full folio
Guests don't care about your back-end tech stack. They expect a single, simple bill at checkout, whether they booked a massage online months ago or bought a coffee at the lobby café five minutes ago.
The operational challenge is syncing that data. Payments, orders, and entitlements often live in different worlds—your web store, your property management system (PMS), and your point of sale (POS). When these systems are disconnected, you end up with manual rekeying, duplicate authorizations, and frustrated staff.
A unified system solves this by acting as a single source of truth. An online prearrival upsell, like a champagne welcome or a cabana rental, posts to the folio guests see at checkout. Channel changes or cancellations automatically update availability across the board, which helps you avoid the nightmare of overbooking.
Foundational technology requirements
To bring a unified vision to life, four systems have to talk to each other:
- PMS: The system of record for reservations, check-in, room assignment, and final folio billing, like Oracle OPERA
- Central reservation system (CRS): The hub that centralizes your data and exposes real-time availability to all your booking channels via API
- Internet booking engine (IBE): The guest-facing layer on your brand site that prices the stay, quotes the total, and collects the payment
- Channel manager: The tool that syncs rates and availability across OTAs and your direct booking channel, pushing reservations back to your PMS to prevent discrepancies
In the past, connecting these systems to your commerce experience required expensive middleware and custom code. Today, unified commerce is the standard.
Through the Shopify Global ERP Program, you can connect the commerce layer to your financial and operational systems of record. Whether you run on Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle NetSuite, SAP, or Acumatica, Shopify integrates natively to ensure data flows freely between your back office and your guests’ screens.
Traveling towards a better platform
As we head into 2026, the mandate for trending tourism websites is to stop renting customer relationships and start owning them. The trends we’ve covered—from hyperpersonalization to unified folios—are your roadmap to lowering customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increasing guest loyalty.
But you can’t get there if your team is stuck fixing code on a brittle, custom-built stack. We’re here to help you build a unified travel brand. Whether you need to enable mobile-first bookings, sync your PMS with your online store, or launch a global merch shop, Shopify provides the flexible foundation you need to move fast.
With a commerce platform that scales with you, you can stop worrying about the technology and start turning high digital expectations into profitable direct bookings.
