Google.com Gets Free Hotel Booking Links to Level Playing Field ... A Tad
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Dennis' Online Travel Briefing
Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, Executive Editor and online travel rockstar Dennis Schaal will bring readers exclusive reporting and insight into the business of online travel and digital booking, and how this sector has an impact across the travel industry.Google announced it expanded free hotel booking links from hotels and online travel agencies to Google.com and Google Maps, supplementing existing paid advertising, after giving similar treatment to its Google Travel portal last year.
Here's what's changing: Previously, if you searched Google.com for a specific hotel, such as "Westin Jersey City Newport," you'd see in the right-hand column an information box with only paid advertising from the likes of Marriott, Expedia, Hotels.com and Booking.com with their rates and booking links to their websites.
However, what's been tweaked is that below those "Featured options" — the ads — in the information box you will see rates and 22 free booking links under the category "All options" from the the Westin Jersey City Newport, ZenHotels.com, and FindHotel.net, as well as bigger names such Expedia, Booking.com and Hotels.com, which also happened to have paid ads displayed higher up, too.
Google gets paid by the click for the paid ads, but gets no compensation from these new free booking links.
To some extent, this democratizes the booking options in Google Search when looking for specific hotels because online travel agencies such as Expedia and Booking.com, each with billions of dollars in their coffers to spend on advertising to gain customers, have dominated travel advertising on Google, even making weak advertising competitors out of big hotel chains, which are certainly no slouches.
Smaller online travel agencies and hotels will undoubtably see their bookings sourced from Googl
