PDF
How our sort order works
Our aim is to share highly relevant results for your search as quickly as possible. We’re constantly optimising our service to sort high volumes of travel options efficiently, so you can find what you’re looking for.
Here are the main factors we use to surface our initial results. We may provide all or only some of the travel services listed below.
Accommodation
We show you a list of relevant and competitive offers based on a range of factors, which include:
  • Location (relative to your search)
  • A property’s price or offers compared to other prices or offers on our site
  • A property’s price or offers compared to its past prices or offers on our sites (i.e. whether it’s a good deal on our platform for your trip timing)
  • How competitive a property’s prices, offers and room availability are on our platform compared to other sites
  • Guest review scores and number of reviews (for properties that are new to our site or those with a low number of reviews, we may use review scores (which we do not verify) from other widely used travel sites)
  • Number of past bookings for the property
  • For vacation rental properties, host response times, booking acceptance rates, Premier Host status, length of stay and availability of instant bookings
Our results also consider the experience of past guests, including:
  • Guest ratings on property cleanliness, staff and service, property condition and amenities
  • Property availability on our platform
  • Property cancellation rates and guest relocation and refund rates
We also consider how much we’re paid when you book and stay at a property, and this is one of the factors taken into consideration when determining the relative order of properties with similar offers in our search results. This includes commissions from accommodation and compensation on bookings including compensation from our partner programme Accelerator (which allows partners to temporarily increase their compensation for enhanced visibility amongst similar properties). What we’re paid recognises the part we play in listing the property on our site and facilitating the booking and your stay at the property. When we’re displaying properties with a similar offer, we may feature properties that offer more commission or compensation higher in the search results listing compared to properties that offer less.
Commission and compensation is not a factor taken into consideration when determining the relative order of properties on our Vrbo, FeWo-direkt, Abritel, Stayz and Bookabach sites.
Flights
For our default sort order (“Recommended”), we show you a list of relevant and competitive flight offers based on a range of factors, which primarily includes: The duration and the price of the flight, compared to other flights available for your search on our site (e.g whether the flight has a shorter duration than others and if it’s a good deal on our platform for your trip timing).
Our results also consider:
  • Duration of the trip, number of travelers, date and time window of departure and date and time window of return, length of the layover, and day of search/booking (i.e we try to show you flight services that best match your needs/are more convenient for your search).
  • Preferences you’ve expressed e.g. if you have selected a particular airline for your outbound route then we will also consider that the same airline or its alliance may be of interest to you for your inbound flight (though it may not be the first flight shown).
  • We do not show airlines that offer commission or compensation higher in the search results listing compared to other offers.
Cars
Results are ordered based on price and other factors including the number of bookings of an offer to date, customer review scores, car category or type and pick-up location relative to your arrival location.
Cruises
Results are ordered based on factors such as cruise line rating, ship rating, price per day, origin rating, destination rating, length of cruise and booking window.
Things to do
Results are ordered based on factors such as price and discounts, previous customer searches, location (including distance from accommodation options), number of bookings, reviews and local research.
Combined searches and vacation packages
Results are ordered by the criteria outlined above for each individual service, unless otherwise noted on the search results page. For example, we may sometimes show curated vacation packages where you’ll be able to change any selections within the curated vacation package.
Advertising
Travel suppliers may also pay to display advertising on our site, including in our search results. Any listing paying directly to appear in a set position in our search results will be marked clearly as an “Ad” (Advertisement) or similar, to show they’re different from other listings.
More about search results
We have selected the factors mentioned above for each travel service as we believe they are informative and important in helping people choose the travel services that best match their needs and they overall tend to be a valuable indicator of positive customer experiences relating to the travel service.
In addition to the initial search results we display, we offer other sort options and filters to help you prioritise and see the best results for you. Our other sort options follow the same factors as above, but allow you to focus your search. For example, for lodging by sorting by lower prices, member prices, higher guest review scores, closer distance to city centre or a higher property class rating and for flights by sorting by price, duration, departure time, arrival time. You can select these other sort options from the drop-down menu on your search results page.
You can also filter by features or amenities that you’re interested in to find the best properties, flights or car rentalsfor you. Note that when performing a search for a return flight, any filter applied for the outbound flight (such as a preference for a morning departure time) will not automatically be applied for the inbound flights and will need to be reselected.
We might also tailor results to you, including by:
    • Looking at travel services you’ve clicked or booked previously on our site from the same browser or app session, or from the same device or earlier visits (i.e. we may pin or show properties or similar properties to those you’ve clicked on or booked previously)
    • Looking at preferences you’ve expressed by previously interacting with our site
    • Reference to your loyalty status
    • Your approximate location
To bring you the best search experience, we retain the right:
  • To display a range but not all possible booking options for certain destinations (i.e. destinations with high availability), noting that you can always scroll or load more properties in the range shown
  • To display newly listed properties higher in search results temporarily to promote visibility and show our variety of offers and options
  • To run limited tests that may temporarily affect how we display listings and search results
  • To display search results and order these differently across our mobile apps and websites (taking into account display differences and different traveller preferences when booking on different devices).