Google’s Quiet Moves to Dominate Hotel Metasearch
Photo Credit: The search giant's improved metasearch product makes bookings faster. Google
Skift Take
Google’s revamped Hotel Ads — which amounts to a streamlined metasearch feature right within Google search results, obviating the need to navigate to Google Hotel Finder – will likely turn out to be one of the most important developments in the metasearch field in 2014-2015.
Last week we launched the latest report in our Skift Trends series, The State of Travel Metasearch in 2015.
Below is an extract. Get the full report here to get ahead of this trend.
In 2009, Steve Hafner of Kayak, which was then an independent private company, said the biggest competitive threat on the horizon for Kayak wasn’t other existing metasearch sites but the prospect that Google, with all its search-engine power, would begin to display hotel pricing.
Google indeed got around to launching a hotel metasearch product, Google Hotel Finder, in July 2011 but it has been a relative nonfactor in terms of market impact in the intervening years — until now.
In November in the U.S., Google changed the format of
