Travel Megatrends 2018: Google Travel's Product-Led Vision Is Bearing Fruit
Skift Take
Skift Megatrends 2018
In January 2018 released our annual travel industry trends forecast, Skift Megatrends 2018. You can read about each of the trends on Skift, or download a copy of our magazine here.At Google, the product side in travel is gaining an upper hand over its traditional advertising business.
What this means is that the trajectory of Google’s own travel offerings beyond the search box — in Google Hotels, Flights, Maps, Trips, and Home, to name a few — highlights the fact that the product folks are winning out over the ad sales team.
Not that anything is so cut and dried at Google. Google Hotels and Google Flights are still, by and large, advertising-driven businesses, but they may be gaining an edge within Google in comparison to its traditional search business.
Rob Torres, Google’s managing director of travel, has said that advertisements in Google Hotels, the company’s metasearch product, convert at a higher rate than those generated in a conventional Google search. The hotel product has dates and rates, and consumers selecting an advertisement with those details are closer to making a buying decision than those who are just starting a search with “hotels in New York.”
In addition, a Google promo for Hotel Ads quotes Ted Schweitzer, La Quinta’s senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce, as saying that Hotel Ads convert at twice the rate of “what we see on regular mobile traffic
