Major Online Travel Exec: Negotiating With Google Is Almost Pointless

This Week In Online Travel You are a top executive making all the important decisions at a major online travel company, and you’ve spent billions of dollars on Google advertising. Along comes the pandemic and you ask Google for a break on your outstanding bills because even your own business partners aren’t paying their invoices to you, either. What was it like behind the scenes in these talks? You’d figure that Google would hand out a few favors to some of its biggest advertisers. Nope. I spoke privately this week with a C-suite executive, who declined to be identified for obvious reasons, about his frustrations in negotiating with Google. The search engine forgave nothing on outstanding bills, and offered a slightly deeper discount than the travel brand already had on future advertising on a related platform, but to get the lower rates the volume commitments would be so large as to be impractical to take advantage of. Until It Isn't Google was insincere in the bargaining, the executive said, although he used a harsher term, referring to those future discounts that the company would never use. “I didn’t expect anything to come out of it. They have a monopoly, I mean, let’s be honest. We are all grownups, and they leverage their market power and that’s what they do. That’s their right — until it