Trivago looks to end its relevancy assessment policy

Travel booking giant, Trivago, has claimed that it is working with other big players in the sector of the industry, including Booking Holdings and Expedia Group, to rid a polemical "relevancy assessment" - put into effect three years ago, and one that has done nothing to help Trivago's finances since its inception. 

In its second quarter financial results announcement, Trivago stated “we have recently been working with our largest advertisers on a large, multimarket test to help us better understand the end-to-end impact on our users’ experience of the aspect of our algorithm that adjusts CPC [cost per click] bids based on the relevance assessment.”

Relevancy assessment adjusts advertisers’ bids and placement in Trivago, based on the company’s assessment of the user experience on advertisers’ websites.

In a question-and-answer session with analysts, Chief Financial Officer Axel Hefer said those tests include advertisers optimizing the user experience with multiple landing pages for different user classes when travelers click over from Trivago to the advertisers sites.

Hefer added that with this “joint optimization” Trivago would be testing whether it makes the “relevance assessment redundant going forward.”

Relevancy assessment woes

A couple of years ago, after Trivago debuted the relevance assessment, Booking Holdings dramatically — and temporarily — reduced its advertising spend in Trivago, and the hotel metasearch site’s profitability and financial performance tanked.

In 2016 when Trivago introduced the relevance assessment, it was trying to address a metasearch albatross. For example, when consumers navigate from a metasearch site to an online travel agency or hotel website advertiser, they often encounter a widely divergent and frequently very poor user experience, including bait-and-switch pricing and difficulties in finding the rate they discovered on the source metasearch website.

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