Google’s New Mobile Tool Lets You Compare Destinations by Price
Photo Credit: Google's price comparison feature for destinations on an iPhone. Skift
Skift Take
Should competitors be concerned that Destinations on Google is a harbinger of Google's global takeover of trip-planning and the travel industry? Don't be paranoid. Plenty of companies can out-compete Google but its dominance of search and ability to make traffic disappear on a dime are ongoing headaches given that the playing field tilts toward Mountain View, California.
As part of a series of product introductions that Google began introducing in beta in November, the search engine has officially launched a feature on mobile that enables users to conduct side-by-side price comparisons of flights and hotels for disparate destinations within a country.
If you search for vacations in Greece and select "view all" when scrolling through photos of Greek destinations, you can select to filter the options by interests, dates or price.
Thus, if you choose "exact dates," such as April 11 - 17, rather than "flexible dates," you'll see an Athens trip might cost $643 for the flight and $67 per night for a hotel while a trip to Santorini would be more expensive because the flight would cost $788 although a hotel stay there could be $63 nightly, a few dollars cheaper than in Athens, for the stay.
Dri
