TikTok Has Entered the Chat: Metasearch

In Brief: Sienna Crawford discusses how TikTok, a popular social media platform, is making inroads into the hospitality industry, particularly in the metasearch domain, thereby altering how customers find and interact with services.

TikTok Has Entered the Chat: Metasearch – By Sienna Crawford – Image Credit Cogwheel Marketing

The only thing more valuable than having someone’s attention is getting them to do something with it, and TikTok has mastered both.

The wild success of TikTokShop has proven that TikTok has the ability to lead its users through a traditional marketing funnel, without ever leaving the app. From inspiration to research, and all the way through to conversion, in a matter of minutes.

Their users bought the suitcase that went viral, now what? 66% of users say TikTok is their most helpful source of travel inspiration, and TikTok reports that their users are 2.6 times more likely to book an experience after searching for it on their app. TikTok wants to cash in, and it is partnering with OTAs to quickly capitalize on this.

TikTok is Beta-Testing its Metasearch Capabilities

As an average, chronically-online millennial, I’ll admit to spending a lot of time on TikTok. I’ve seen hotel metasearch appear on my FYP (For You Page) only twice in the last month.

This is new. It is not being promoted (yet). TikTok is still figuring it out.

How Does it Work?

As users swipe through videos on TikTok, a card appears in place of the next video. This card displays a hotel photo, the hotel name, and several options (with rates) to book the hotel.

If the user clicks “View,” they are redirected from TikTok to an OTA to book.

If the user clicks “Not Interested,” then TikTok records this as negative feedback as part of the beta test.

If the user clicks “Explore More,” then they stay in the app and are brought to TikTok’s version of a hotel listing.
- TikTok hotel listings can be independently navigated to when a user searches for hotels in a certain destination and selects the “places” tab.

This metasearch feature is different from TikTok’s Travel Ads product, which are traditional video or carousel ads with targeted audiences and “Book Now” CTAs that drive to a website of the advertiser’s choosing.

Where Does TikTok Get Hotel Information?

TikTok is not scraping hotel sites directly, it is aggregating data from upstream POI providers to populate the information in hotel listings; most likely via the OTA metadata that is already feeding TikTok real-time rates and availability, TripAdvisor reviews, and more. TikTok utilizes UGC for reviews from their users, some photos, and paying their TikTokGo creators to generate hotel-specific content.

Will TikTok Hotel Listings Help Me with GEO?

AI generally prioritizes primary, structured, and authoritative travel data sources (hotel websites), which allows it to make more reliable recommendations than citing a downstream POI or social media listings.

AI could crawl TikTok data as a secondary signal, looking for social popularity, lifestyle context, or sentiment signals. Learn more about SEO vs. GEO strategies.

How Do I Manage My TikTok Hotel Listing and Respond to Reviews?

We’ve made several attempts to ask TikTok this question, stay tuned! If your hotel is enrolled in Cogwheel Marketing account management services and you’d like to volunteer, allowing us to create a TikTok business account and investigate further, please let us know (posting dancing videos not included).