Full Video: Google's Head of Travel at Skift Global Forum 2022

Google's been busy these past few months, updating its options for rail travel but also making the news for its controversial move to remove contrail emissions data. But speaking at Skift Global Forum, Richard Holden, vice president of product management at Google Travel, also shared some future developments, including the return of its own fintech product whose life was cut short by the pandemic.

Watch Holden's full on-stage appearance with Skift founding editor and executive editor, Dennis Schaal, as well as read a transcript of it, below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg9wMi39YdA&t Interview Transcript

Dennis Schaal: Hey, everybody. Richard, thank you very much for being here.

Richard Holden: Good To see you, Dennis.

Schaal: So this is the 11th anniversary of the launch of Google Travel. Started out with Google Flights. I remember the whole thing, acquiring ITA software. You've been at Google since 2002. You've seen the development of the whole thing. How is it different than what you imagined it would turn into? What were some of the challenges along the way? How has it evolved?

Holden: That's a good question. Before we acquired ITA and launched flight search, we did have a hotel search product at that time too. I wasn't actually involved in the travel products, and I was working on our ad products. But I think they've evolved quite nicely through the years in terms of just improving core search, core vertical search as well too. We've started from a nub of what was really a local search for hotels at the time into having a very rich product at this point with lots of content through lots of partnerships we have in terms of photos, reviews, location, information, et cetera, bringing all those pieces together. And then we spent a lot of time over the last few years also just engaging more and more partners across the industry to get on the platform too as well to help drive more traffic to them.

So I don't know if I had a vision because I wasn't there at the first day when we launched the products, but I think they've evolved nicely in terms of the comprehensiveness both on the flight side, the hotel side, now working on things to do, each of these sub-verticals we've been pursuing. It's really about building the best consumer experience possible. And usually that's about getting the most data, the most comprehensive data that we can get. And I think we've made good strides on