Google’s Ticketing for Attractions Off to Rough Start

Online Travel This Week

In what might be Google’s most glitchy product implementation in travel to date, its public beta of offering tickets to major attractions and landmarks has been derided by some tour operators and tech companies, while even a self-described Google fan pointed to its shortcomings.

On mobile devices when searching for the New York’s Empire State Building, for instance, Google scapes the landmark’s website to offer $42 tickets for adults to enter the 86th floor observatory, and then also compares that price and product with a somewhat dissimilar $45 skip-the-line online tickets from the likes of Headout, Viator and GetYourGuide, as well as $125 tickets from China’s Trip.com. Such disparities and disconnects are rife in others of the thousands of attractions’ tickets Google is currently offering around the world.

It turns out the $125 Trip.com ticket for the Empire State Building is a “premium ticket” to observe sunset in the observatory so it is hardly comparable to the ticket from the official attraction website, let alone the skip-the-line tickets from a half-dozen online travel agencies.

One Google partner working to connect tour operators with the Google Things to Do product, called the quality issues with the beta, including a link for the Intrepid Air & Space Museum that misleadingly leads users to the Empire State Building for a city pass that offers admission to both attractions, “unacceptable” for a company with Google’s track record and resources. The tech company CEO, with many tour operator clients, declined to be identified out of fear of damaging relations with Google.

Google is aware of the implementation issues, which show the complexities of bringing the fragmented tours and attractions sector online compared with the far more consolidated hotel and airline industries, especially in the United States. Google undoubtably will ultimately work out the kinks with the beta despite the pain that the its shortcomings are meting out to some tour operators.

Despite the reputation hit for the sloppiness of the attractions beta, Google has the luxury of being able to take its time to get things right. This beta will not make or break Google, which is seeing its advertising business thrive, pandemic or not.

“In these early stages, we’re working closely with our partners to incorporate supplier feedback and understand how we can better support their needs as we evolve this new offering,” a Google spokesperson said. “We anticipate that over the medium and long term, the changes we are making will be highly beneficial for consumers as well as the broader ecosystem of operators, connectivity partners and online travel agencies.”

The connectivity partner was livid at the timing of Google’s attractions beta, which replaced Reserve with Google starting August 1. Tour operators, which participated for free in Reserve with Google from their business listings’ pages, generated significant volumes from Reserve, and the leads converted to tour and activities bookings very efficiently, said the connectivity partner CEO.

Yet Google mothballed Reserve with Google at the height of the summer travel season in North America right when operators were trying to recover from the pandemic’s existential hangover. And while Reserve with Google offered both tours and attractions, the current Google Things to Do beta is more limited in offering only attractions — although tours are on the roadmap — so the adverse impact is a double whammy, the connectivity partner CEO said.

“It is a massive disservice,” the Google partner said, wondering why the implementation couldn’t have come later in the year when the sector slows down. “It came at the absolute wrong time. The worst time in history.”

Not everyone is so down on the beta. In Australia, Livn CEO Mark Rizzuto, who calls himself a Google “fan,” believes the Google attractions ticket beta represents “a leveling of the playing field” because it enables operators to offer their links to sell attractions tickets for free so in theory they can compete with online travel agencies like Viator, GetYourGuide and Klook, which often dominate paid search. Livn is a channel manager, handling distribution through a multitude of online travel agencies and metasearch sites for tour and activities operators.

These free links to operators and online travel agencies to provide attractions tickets, and eventually tours and activities, are a temporary building block. Google has publicly stated that its intent is for Things to Do to resemble Google’s hotel search in that it will be a blend of paid and free links.

Both Rizzuto and the unidentified connectivity partner agreed that Google has been slow to on-board tour operators which are otherwise ready to offer attractions in the beta, leaving them shut out for now, and the communication from Google about the implementation and its strategy have been less than rigorous.

Rizzuto said he expects things to improve on Google’s end shortly, adding so far “it is taking a bit of time and there is a lack of automation on Google’s end.”

For its part, when it comes to the attractions ticket beta, Google is investing in manual and automated quality control measures, which is a tacit admission that the beta’s problems need to be resolved.

Refinements to the beta are on the way, and some of these are geared to help consumers compare attractions tickets on an apples to apples basis as they search for for them. In that way, they won’t be comparing prices on a ticket for a sunrise visit to the Empire State Building with an ordinary admissions ticket.

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