Michelin and TripAdvisor, with its subsidiary TheFork, have entered into a content and licensing partnership to combine the gastronomic selection expertise of the MICHELIN Guide with the power of TripAdvisor’s large customer audience and TheFork’s advanced booking service.
All of the 14,000 restaurants selected by the MICHELIN Guide inspectors worldwide will be clearly identified with their ratings Star, Bib Gourmand and Plate distinctions on the TripAdvisor website and apps leading to significantly improved accessibility of the Michelin selection. Around 4,000 restaurants throughout Europe will soon be accessible and bookable on TheFork, and on the digital MICHELIN Guide platform.
In addition, Michelin has signed an agreement to sell Bookatable to TheFork. This acquisition allows TheFork to consolidate its existing markets and expand into five new countries: United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Finland and Norway. This means that the 14,000 restaurants bookable on Bookatable will join the 67,000 already bookable on TheFork, creating the largest online restaurant booking platform.
For nearly 120 years, the MICHELIN Guide has endeavored to provide people with the best, independent and most trustworthy information on restaurants while at the same time constantly respecting local regions and gourmet traditions and promoting the work of passionate chefs to equally passionate diners. Due to the objective nature of the criteria used by Michelin’s inspectors, the MICHELIN Guide also helps expand the influence of the world’s gastronomic traditions and increase tourism.
The partnership between the MICHELIN Guide and TripAdvisor and TheFork will significantly increase the visibility of the chefs and restaurants of the MICHELIN Guide and increase booking thanks to the link to the world’s leading online booking platforms.
“With our more than 120 years of experience making gastronomic guides which provide restaurant recommendations based on independent, expert inspectors, this strategic partnership between Michelin and TripAdvisor will offer unprecedented visibility to the establishments listed in the MICHELIN Guide selections around the world,” said Scott Clark, member of the Michelin Group Executive Committee. “By combining the MICHELIN Guide’s unique restaurant curation and selection criteria, with TripAdvisor’s comprehensive travel planning platform, we will be able to make the MICHELIN Guide’s selections accessible to a much larger number of diners around the world.”
Together, these ambitious agreements will make it possible to offer millions of consumers the possibility to easily identify and book Michelin-selected restaurants on TheFork. In exchange, all TheFork restaurants partners listed in the MICHELIN Guide selections will also be bookable on the MICHELIN Guide digital platforms, web at: guide.michelin.com and App.
“We are happy to add Bookatable by Michelin to the TripAdvisor family. This agreement allows us to continue expanding our business geographically, while offering an even more valuable service to restaurants and diners alike,” said Bertrand Jelensperger, senior vice president, TripAdvisor Restaurants and CEO, TheFork. “We’ll soon make Michelin-selected bookable restaurants more visible on our platforms to better serve our users and drive the right customers to each restaurant.”
TheFork and TripAdvisor offer restaurants a huge audience of high-intent diners. TheFork targets foodies in 22 markets thanks to the acquisition, with more focus on local consumers, counting over 80,000 bookable restaurants and 30 million-plus monthly visits, while TripAdvisor helps nearly 460 million travellers each month to plan better trips with the help of more than 830 million reviews and opinions of 8.6 million accommodations, restaurants, experiences, airlines and cruises. These virtual visitors are a huge pool of new customers for restaurants and can positively impact their revenues significantly.
According to a recent study conducted by Strategy&, a member of the PwC network, the companies together influenced nearly $8 billion in revenue in 2018 across six markets studied (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom), and this representing over 320 million additional meals in restaurants.
