Articles tagged “google”

Like Hipmunk, Room 77 had an innovative product and talented team but ran into a buzz saw: the marketing clout of Google preferencing its own products, and Expedia, Booking.com and Kayak. Don't feel sorry for the venture capital firms receiving just 53 cents on the dollar. That's the game they play. The real losers are the angel investor and employees, although we're sure for many it was quite a ride nonetheless.

Gogobot likely paid some big bucks for the Trip.com domain, and it is making strides with a high-quality recommendation app. Still, everyone in the travel space, especially startups, is feeling like they are running uphill as Google tosses boulders downward. Slow, steady steps may win the day.

Google may not be on the road toward becoming an online travel agency, but the search engine is inserting itself more aggressively in the travel research and hotel-shopping process.

Tourism and hospitality companies have an opportunity with Mapillary to create their own ground-level, photo-based mapping platforms without having to wait for Google Street View teams to create or update them.

Google has owned the search engine business since the dawn of the Internet and it's now getting closer to actually answering travelers search queries rather than providing a list of relevant and irrelevant links.

Google is using its Google Flights capability to power its new Artificial Intelligence-filled Assistant to respond intelligently to queries about travel. The service's inability to respond to queries about your existing travel itineraries, however, is a huge missed opportunity for now.

If publicly traded companies such as Google are bound by fiduciary duties to shareholders, then Google, which already has one of the largest travel businesses in the world, larger than the Priceline Group, TripAdvisor and Ctrip combined, would be foolhardy to shoot its advertising business in the foot to become an online travel agency.

Google, in theory, like TripAdvisor, has the ability to put it all together and become a one-stop shop in travel but Oliver Heckmann, who heads Google's travel products, says that isn't part of the search engine's grand scheme. We sort of believe him (stay tuned for more).

Google has several very clear advantages over competitors: its mountains of data sets and the computing power to do something with them. That's the context of some of these incremental changes in Google Flights and hotel search. Slowly but surely, after much data crunching and testing, Google -- which already is one of the largest players in travel -- is enhancing its flight and hotel products for consumers and advertisers.

Google says it wants to provide users with the best answers and connect them to online travel agencies, airlines, and hotels. But Google could also provide greater booking functionality one day soon.