Online Travel Market Size, Share, and Growth Forecast

Online Travel Market Size, Share, and Growth Forecast | 2035

Posted 2025-10-10 09:30:04

The significant growth within the global online travel sector is not being captured uniformly; a detailed analysis of the Online Travel Market Growth Share by Company reveals a clear and decisive pattern where the largest global Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and players with a strong foothold in the alternative accommodations sector are seizing a disproportionate share of new market value. The primary winners in the current landscape are the major OTA conglomerates, Booking Holdings and Expedia Group. Their growth is a direct function of their immense scale, their massive marketing budgets, and their superior technology platforms. They capture an outsized share of the market's growth by being the default starting point for a huge portion of global travelers. Their ability to spend billions of dollars annually on performance marketing, particularly on Google, ensures that they dominate the search results for nearly every travel-related query, allowing them to continuously acquire new customers and to benefit most from the overall secular shift of travel booking from offline to online channels. The Global Online Travel Market size is projected to grow USD 955.41 Billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 4.8% during the forecast period 2024 - 2032.

In parallel to the dominance of the major OTAs, a significant portion of the growth share is also being captured by the leaders in the alternative accommodations and vacation rental space, most notably Airbnb and Booking.com (with its vast inventory of non-hotel properties) and Vrbo (part of Expedia Group). This segment has been the fastest-growing category within the broader travel market, driven by a fundamental shift in consumer preference towards more unique, local, and often more spacious and affordable lodging options than traditional hotels. Airbnb, in particular, has captured a massive share of this growth by creating a powerful, trusted, community-driven brand and a user-friendly platform that has become synonymous with the category. The major OTAs have responded by aggressively building out their own vacation rental inventory, making this segment a key battleground and a primary driver of their own growth share.

While the OTAs and alternative accommodation leaders capture the bulk of the growth, a more fragmented but important source of growth share comes from the rise of specialized and experience-focused platforms. This includes companies that focus on the "things to do" segment of travel, such as tour and activity booking platforms like Viator (owned by Tripadvisor) and GetYourGuide. As travelers increasingly seek to book their entire trip itinerary online, from the flight and hotel to the local cooking class or museum tour, these "in-destination" experience platforms are capturing a new and rapidly growing share of the total travel spend. The overall picture of growth share is therefore a multi-layered story: the OTA giants are winning the scale and marketing battle, the alternative accommodation leaders are winning the shift in consumer preference, and the experience platforms are winning the battle for the in-destination wallet.