Skift Take
Google deserves to get paid for advertising services rendered. The company could have used the coronavirus crisis to engender some much-needed goodwill among its legions of advertisers, with a degree of flexibility during the months the music died. Opportunity lost.
Google is feeling the heat over its unwillingness to discount travel advertisers' unpaid advertising bills that grew out of the Covid-19-induced economic collapse, and its payment-collection practices, which include barring new advertising for nonpayment.
Google believes that German and French companies that publicly called on Google in recent months to give them relief from their first quarter bills, when their advertising spending turned into a mountain of cancelled bookings, are looking for special treatment and one-off deals.
Google issued a new statement about its billing practices Wednesday.
“We fully recognize the enormous challenges facing the travel industry, and we’ve been working in close collaboration with travel advertisers to help them protect their businesses and look toward recovery," Google stated. "The issue of payments' collection applies to only a very small number of travel companies, and virtually all of our partners in the industry do not have overdue bills with us."
Unlike companies such as InterContinental Hotels Group, Facebook, and Amazon, which were reportedly willing to hand out discounts to partners or agree to payment plans for their overdue bills, Google h
