Competing with Booking.com while also selling through it means the direct site has to be worth choosing on something other than inventory.
2
Property types
boutique hotels and apartments
8+
OTA channels
Booking.com, Expedia, Vrbo and more
Direct
Booking focus
editorial-led discovery
The problem
Sonder sells through Booking.com, Expedia, Vrbo and half a dozen other channels, and those channels are also its competitors on the direct site. Nobody wins that fight on inventory or on search UX, because the OTAs have spent a decade and a fortune on both.
The direct site therefore has to earn the booking on something else: brand, curation and the parts of the experience an OTA listing cannot convey.
What we did
The site leads with editorial rather than a filter panel. Collections and curated groupings do the work an OTA cannot: they present a stay as a choice with a point of view instead of a row in a results table.
Search is present and prominent, filtered by apartments, boutique hotels or both, but it is not the only entry point. Someone who does not yet know which city they want is served by the editorial route instead of being dead-ended at an empty search.
OTA partner logos sit directly under the fold. Listing your competitors on your own homepage is counterintuitive and correct: it borrows their trust for a brand the visitor may not know yet.
The outcome
The direct site competes on curation and brand rather than trying to beat the OTAs at a search problem they have already solved.
Frontend
Commerce
What we learned
If you distribute through the platforms you compete with, the direct channel has to win on brand and curation, not on search.
Showing the OTAs you sell through borrows their trust rather than leaking traffic to them.
Thirty minutes with the engineer who would lead the project. You will leave with an opinion on what to build, what to skip, and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
2 build slots open · Next start: early next month
What happens next