What is the look-to-book ratio?
The look-to-book ratio is the number of searches or availability requests a seller sends to a supplier for every booking it completes.
A platform sending 2,000 searches per booking has a look-to-book ratio of 2,000:1. Suppliers track it because searches consume their capacity, and some contracts set limits or charge for excess searches.
What drives it up
Bots and scrapers, metasearch traffic, duplicate requests, over-wide supplier fan-out and features such as flexible-date calendars all increase searches faster than bookings.
How platforms control it
Cache with sensible lifetimes and re-price before booking, deduplicate identical in-flight searches, route searches only to suppliers that serve the market, filter automated traffic, and improve conversion. You can model the effect of these levers with the look-to-book calculator.