Skift Take
If you build it, and it is comprehensive and works at breakneck speeds, they will come. That's the mantra of Google, which is taking its sweet time to expand its flight and hotel partnerships around the world.
Editor’s note: Skift is two years old as of today, and we’re rolling out a week of special travel industry coverage. This is one of a series you can find in full here, as we roll out these stories.
It hasn't always been easy for outsiders to figure out who oversees Google's travel products, but finally we have an answer: It is Richard Holden, who focused on product management, mostly for AdWords, for about a dozen years, and about a year ago became product management director, Travel, reporting to Sridhar Ramaswamy, who heads Ads and Commerce.
Skift caught up with Holden to ask him how he views the progress and status of what loosely can be called Google Travel, which over the last fews years has benefited from the acquisitions of ITA Software, Zagat, and Frommer's, and introduced Google Flight Search and Google Hotel Finder.
Incidentally, as reported, Google's supposed licensing deal of Room77 technology was primarily a talent grab, he says. Meanwhile, big acquisitions in travel don't appear to be imminent.
There are ironies in where Google Travel finds itself. Holden believes that one of the key differentiators in Google's two most prominent travel products is their speed in returning flight and hotel search results.
Yet Holden acknowledges that there are content gaps in both products, and Google is therefore focused behind the scenes on the not-so-glamorous task of notching new airline and hotel partnerships around the world at what some critics might view as a plodding pace.
But, Holden isn't in a hurry, observing that "we've had 14 years of working on search and AdWords. We are getting started" in travel. Although there currently are hints of integrating Google's disparate travel offerings, you can definitely expect more of that in the future, particularly through search.
Following is the Skift interview with Holden about the state of Google Travel:
Richard Holden: About a year ago, [YouTube senior vice president] Susan Wojcicki, when she was still running our Ads and Commerce area, asked me to get involved in the travel efforts we had ongoing. At that point we had our product managers split across a couple of different groups and different managers, and she asked me to come in and manage the travel product managers as one group. I've been doing this for almost a year now.
I work with our product managers here in Mountain View, Boston and in Zurich on building out our various travel features. I work with a team of engin
