Skift Take
This likely will be a year of building out what TripAdvisor already has in hotel Instant Booking, vacation rentals and tours and activities. One big challenge will be how to focus effectively in so many huge areas simultaneously without some getting short shrift.
As TripAdvisor fine-tunes its Instant Booking moves in 2016, now that it has Booking.com, Starwood and most of the globe's major hotel chains signed up, a TripAdvisor official says the company isn't particularly concerned about Google's product rollouts, including Book on Google.
In this first article in a three-part series, Challenges in Travel Booking 2016, Skift examines company-specific issues confronting three major online travel players, TripAdvisor, the Priceline Group and Expedia, in the coming year. To find the stories in the series click here.
"Google is always going to be a competitive threat," says Adam Medros, senior vice president, global product at TripAdvisor.
Medros says, however, that while Google's travel products aren't the "best," TripAdvisor continues to be concerned about Google's "near monopoly in search," which he says is harmful for consumers and the competition.
"It's critical that consumers aren't diverted" from the information they are seeking and instead get misdirected toward Google's own products because of Google's grip on search, he adds.
In November 2015, TripAdvisor and Yelp, which have been persistent critics of Google's practices over the years, found their search results knocked way down on the page, and Google attributed it all to a coding glitch. TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer tweeted at the time, "Gimme a break, @google. Search for 'tripadvisor hilton' puts the tripadvisor links so far down you can't see it."
Gimme a break, @google. Search for "tripadvisor hilton" puts the tripadvisor link so far down you can't see it. https://t.co/fy1yO7ukDq
— stephen kaufer (@kaufer) November 22, 2015
Medros says TripAdviso
