Articles tagged “google”

Visit Faroe Islands sees its lack of Google Street View as a hindrance to tourism, so the tourism bureau is making its own "Sheep View." Even if the technology doesn't work perfectly, the project itself is getting attention and might boost tourism anyway.

Asia-Pacific is expected to replace North America as the world's biggest online travel market next year. If your travel business operates online, it's time to take a good, hard, look at your Asia-Pacific strategy.

It seemingly takes Google forever to roll out new features in travel products such as Hotel Ads and Google Flights. But in light of all that A/B testing going on, Google will continue to take its own sweet time. Google is not beholden to anyone else's schedule. After all, it's Google.

In an age where almost anything can be on-demand and every hotel company says it wants to personalize and customize hotel guest experience, why is it still so hard for us to get the exact room we want to stay in?

As with anything Google does, you can expect Google Trips to be very much a work in progress that goes through numerous iterations before it becomes available to the public. But its beta release expands Google's footprint in the travel ecosystem especially since so many consumers begin their trip planning in the search engine and explore destinations with the Maps app.

Digital payments are big business. It's not just a question of how travelers spend. It's about the market power that comes from knowing how they spend, and other companies' access to that information.

Google tends to favor digital products over human-facing services but it's possible that a new "travel assistant app" could blend the two. Then again, they've tried this before.

Many cash-strapped independent hoteliers have been relatively laid back and allowed Booking.com to bid on their trademarked names and are even handing over their digital marketing and website creation to Booking.com's BookingSuite division. Given their resource constraints, that's not likely to change in any meaningful way anytime soon.

I remain employed as a journalist because of the countless stories I've written in the past -- and will likely write in the future -- about the harrowing (to some) prospect of Google becoming an online travel agency. I wouldn't bet on that scenario in the next couple of years. On the other hand, nothing in life or business stays the same.

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.