InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) is the latest hotel giant to join TripAdvisor's instant booking marketplace.
Announced Thursday, the partnership will allow guests to book all of IHG's hotel brands through TripAdvisor.com or the company's mobile app.
The integration will take place in the coming months and, once fully up and running, users can click "Book Now" to initiate a reservation. The IHG brand will handle the transaction and customer service from there.
"Trusted hotels, like those within the IHG family of brands, give hotel shoppers confidence that they'll be able to have a better booking experience through TripAdvisor because of the wide range of inventory, room content and the best rates we offer," TripAdvisor's senior vice president of global advertising Robin Ingle said in a statement.
IHG boasts approximately 5,200 hotels and 770,000 available rooms in almost 100 countries around the world. In addition to its flagship brand InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, IHG's popular brands include Holiday Inn, Kimpton, Crowne Plaza and Candlewood Suites, among others.
TripAdvisor's partnership with IHG comes just three months after Hilton agreed to join the platform and is the latest of many expansions since the platform initially launched in 2014.
Marriott International, which is now the world's largest hotel company after completing its acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide last year, signed on to the platform during 2015. The the marketplace was further expanded beyond the U.S. and U.K. to nine other English-speaking countries in 2016, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore and South Africa.
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Beyond instant booking, TripAdvisor's traveler reviews have delivered a huge boost to the travel and tourism industry. Last year, an Oxford Economics study found the site influenced $478 billion in spending on travel during 2014.
In the site's latest effort to simplify travel, it's teamed up with Facebook Messenger to launch a chatbot that allows users to access reviews and recommendations from the popular messaging platform.
The bot does the heavy lifting and can eventually nail down users' preferences to make better suggestions in the future.
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