Google Set to Debut Its Most Disruptive Travel Product
Skift Take
Despite the mobile revolution, it is tough to believe that Google would make a game-changing bet on hotels and other suppliers over OTAs and metas when the latter two categories generally have much larger marketing budgets.
The sky is falling for online travel agencies and metasearch players because Google is rolling out a couple of new advertising products for hotels and wholesalers that will likely level "the search playing field in travel like we have never seen before."
That's the word from Evercore in a new report, Google's Travel Plans in a Post-Atomic Era [embedded below].
One product, Limited Offers, which appears to be an experiment but Evercore says was launched this summer, enables hoteliers to work around rate parity provisions and to contract with wholesalers to offer limited-time discounts off published rates on Google to fill rooms, thus undermining the published and opaque rates found on Expedia, Hotwire, Booking.com, Priceline Express Deals, and TripAdvisor.
Here's an example of a Limited Offer from the report that purports to show a 30% discount off the published rate that a wholesaler, Lmtclub.com, did for the W San Francisco in Google Hotel Finder.
Evercore believes a second initiative, a soon-to-come "captive demand platform" in partnership with major brands, would be "potentially the most disruptive travel init
