TikTok announced yesterday that there’s a new use case on the viral video app: booking your next vacation. The thought is that you can learn about new places and activities organically on TikTok – as is the normal course of things – then turn that inspiration into action with transactional functionality.
Known as TikTok GO, it will take shape in calls to action to book hotels and attractions. These will appear in videos, search, and location pages. Each of these formats will offer contextually-relevant calls to action. Searches on TikTok could be particularly opportune for these updates, given explicit user intent.
From the user’s perspective, they can click these new calls to action to view details on hotels, check availability, and complete bookings – all without leaving the app. This is all made possible through API integrations from travel apps such as booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com.
In addition to rolling out these calls to action programmatically – presumably utilizing TikTok’s famous content discovery algorithms – it’s also making them available to creators. Content creators on TikTok can add these booking widgets to their content and earn affiliate revenue for any user action that results.
Social Commerce
Stepping back, TikTok’s moves here are notable for a few reasons, and aligned with macro trends we’re tracking. The first is the continued evolution of social commerce. Occurring at the intersection of social media and eCommerce, it’s when users are inspired to buy things by content in their social feeds .
From the perspective of social apps, they can see the escalating levels of time spent in their feeds, and the fact that much of that content is aspirational and inspirational. So they see it as a good opportunity to monetize all that energy by giving it oxygen to make impulse purchases without leaving the app.
That last part is critical not just to reduce clicks for users and boost conversion rates, but to own the entire funnel. In that way, social apps can minimize typical eCommerce margin compression because the transaction happens under their roofs. This is the idea behind related efforts like TikTok Shop.
In fact, travel is a direct extension of a broader social commerce play at TikTok, and one of the first times the effort has gone vertical. That alone is telling of what we could see next as TikTok identifies and develops high-value verticals for direct-commerce integrations. Our money is on food & fashion.
One-Stop Shop
The other trend this move aligns with is broader and longstanding ambition for the holy grail of the app world: the super app. The idea is to create a one-stop shop for everything from food ordering to hotel bookings to entertainment. WeChat and others in China offer a model, but it hasn’t materialized in the U.S.
With its roots in China, TikTok no doubt sees benefits and a possible path to becoming a super app. It has some of the ingredients in terms of having a massive user base and deep engagement through its core content graph. Now it’s all about infusing adjacent and complementary functions like eCommerce.
Another Western app has many of these ingredients: Uber. Not only does it have high engagement in its core function, but another key element: an established payments infrastructure. It’s already started to leverage this in its moves into food delivery and other functions that are adjacent to transportation.
The reason we mention Uber is that it also ties back to TikTok’s latest move. You may have heard that Uber recently integrated hotel bookings. This makes sense as about 15 percent of Uber rides are to or from an airport. Look for more integrations from Uber, TikTok, and others chasing the super-app prize.
