Booking accommodations online is more and more popular. There are thousands of accommodation booking sites online. How to determine which one is more reliable? Well, reliability is a relative term. Almost every renown OTA got some negative comments or complaints online. After all, there are hundreds of millions of travelers to serve. It is impossible to make everyone happy.
To be objective, we picked up two measurable metrics as proxy of reliability – company size measured by number of employees and company age. In general, the larger the company and the longer the history, the more reliable the website is. If an OTA is large enough, it is unlikely going out of business overnight. And the size could be an evidence of its healthy growth. So is the age. If a company has gone through many years of ups and downs, it must have some value appealing to customers.
In the bubble chart below, bubble size represents monthly visits to the booking site (primary domain). In our opinion, the top right corner is the relatively reliable zone because players in this zone have the most supporting staff and the most experience in this industry.