Articles tagged “google”

Airbnb has bigger concerns than the scenario of one more big city, Chicago, that is potentially tightening its short-term rental restrictions. But such an action certainly wouldn't help.

The Skift Health Score ranked Booking Holdings as the overall leader in August among 100 public travel companies but the entire travel industry faces grave uncertainties. Then there's that little search engine Google, which has an even larger travel business than Booking.

When it comes to brainstorming, there's no substitute for a Skift reporter ambling over to a Skift Research analyst's desk, and shooting the breeze about Oyo's model, or looking over a shoulder to view on screen how Expedia's marketing spend is trending. That dynamic is really tough to replicate on Zoom.

In coronavirus-related travel stories this week, Skift looked at the shifting lineup in Google vacation rentals, Airbnb's ambitions, what a prospective merger between IHG and Accor might look like, and how Croatia's tourism experiment is working out.

If there is one permanent legacy from the coronavirus pandemic’s grip on the hotel industry, it is likely the move toward technology features that reduce the amount of staff interaction. Google is the latest company to join the movement.

As a public company, Airbnb would be a dream for reporters, analysts, and investors because of the required disclosures about financials and strategy. It could also prompt competitors to up their game, and perhaps be more forthcoming about the numbers behind their own short-term rental businesses.

The online travel agency lineup in Google vacation rentals involves strategic considerations: take advantage of the bookings, and strengthen Google's competitive position in the process, or risk going without.

In conavirus-related travel stories this week, Skift looked at Las Vegas' chances without conventions, Google's new advertising product, inroads by private jet operators, and a hole in the travel industry's coronavirus sanitation response.

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.

With parent company Alphabet generating $79 billion in revenue in the first half of 2020, Google is relentlessly rolling out new travel products. Not to mention, it is dictating content-licensing and advertising terms to cash-strapped partners while a pandemic rages. Enough said.