Articles tagged “google”

Google is an even mightier king in 2016 when it comes to what leads travelers' to brand websites and, ultimately, what gets them to make a purchase. But direct website visits shouldn't be overlooked: These were the next largest source of site visits and revenue.

Google already had Google Maps when it added Google Flights in 2011 and later hotel metasearch and booking. With the launches of a destinations app, which pairs flight and hotel bookings, in 2015, and now the Google Trips app for organizing reservations and making tours and activities recommendations, Google's travel business is slowly, if steadily, becoming pervasive. Google can afford to bide its time -- it is, after all, Google.

One photo of an exotic place is all it takes to be inspired to visit — that’s why it’s important for DMOs to invest in visual storytelling. Download CrowdRiff’s free report to learn how to take your visual content to the next level.

Google-owned Waze is a compelling navigation app, but whether Google can turn it into the foundation for a winning ride-share service will have to be tested in the marketplace over the next few months and years. Google is a latecomer to the field, although the sector is likely to undergo more disruption and a revolution in years to come.

When it comes to the potential of Southeast Asia's diverse online travel market, investors and online travel brands can no longer view what will be a gigantic market as something they can ignore for now and figure out later.

If Google is using the "wisdom of the crowds" to determine how it arranges restaurant information in search results then in a lot of ways it believes professional reviews, and especially those from its Zagat franchise, trump user reviews. But when it gets down to displaying the text of diners' reviews, Google unfairly believes that its own consumer reviews are the fairest of them all.

The European regulatory probe of Google on several fronts is putting pressure on the U.S.'s FTC to jump into the fray after bowing out under less-than-stellar circumstances a few years ago. Still, don't expect any meaningful changes in Google's practices until the regulatory processes likely wind through the courts.

While one U.S. administration is getting ready to pack up things in the White House and Trump or Clinton hope to redecorate the place on their own, it could be an opportune time to sneak a Priceline-TripAdvisor or Google-TripAdvisor marriage past those sometimes-pesky antitrust regulators.