Articles tagged “google”

Nothing helps building a fruitful online travel agency-hotel relationship for Expedia and Marriott than than the latter's wooing another suitor like TripAdvisor. All is fair in love and travel.

After lots of experimentation, Google realized it didn't need a hotel metasearch site like Google Hotel Finder because it has the Google search engine. That is a formidable asset, to say the least, and it will be a challenge over the years to the powers that be in hotel booking.

Knowing where interest in flight searches comes from for each destination is crucial for all players involved in the travel ecosystem and these charts show where interest was concentrated for major U.S. cities for the summer months, one of the busiest travel seasons.

Expedia is content to work with Google on hotel bookings while stiff-arming TripAdvisor. There is likely more to the warming and cooling relationships than just the relative economics.

TripAdvisor has scaled up Instant Booking fairly rapidly. Google's addition of AccorHotels' brands shows that Google can do likewise.

Mobile is everything in Latin America, even more so than the U.S., so travelers in Brazil and Mexico are more receptive to using digital payment features than their peers in the U.S.

With the emergence of TripAdvisor and Google as online travel agency alternatives and Amazon waiting in the wings if it ever figures out what it wants to do in travel, all the signs point toward an increasingly competitive online travel agency market in the U.S. These are factors the DOJ will consider when mulling the Expedia-Orbitz deal.

Google has the ability to scale its hotel-booking service because of the already-existing integration of third-party hotel-technology partners such as Sabre, and due to Google's sheer reach.

For Google, the new program means it has the potential to become even more of a central hub for the travel industry as it can offer hotel-booking functionality to its massive base of users on desktop and mobile, in search and maps. Just wait until Google integrates flights and hotels. That's coming too.

How soon will it be before U.S. regulators take up the issue of the pricing control wielded by the four largest U.S. airlines? On the other hand, the U.S. Department of Justice helped to create this mess.