Articles tagged “google”

In an age where almost anything can be on-demand and every hotel company says it wants to personalize and customize hotel guest experience, why is it still so hard for us to get the exact room we want to stay in?

As with anything Google does, you can expect Google Trips to be very much a work in progress that goes through numerous iterations before it becomes available to the public. But its beta release expands Google's footprint in the travel ecosystem especially since so many consumers begin their trip planning in the search engine and explore destinations with the Maps app.

Digital payments are big business. It's not just a question of how travelers spend. It's about the market power that comes from knowing how they spend, and other companies' access to that information.

Google tends to favor digital products over human-facing services but it's possible that a new "travel assistant app" could blend the two. Then again, they've tried this before.

Many cash-strapped independent hoteliers have been relatively laid back and allowed Booking.com to bid on their trademarked names and are even handing over their digital marketing and website creation to Booking.com's BookingSuite division. Given their resource constraints, that's not likely to change in any meaningful way anytime soon.

I remain employed as a journalist because of the countless stories I've written in the past -- and will likely write in the future -- about the harrowing (to some) prospect of Google becoming an online travel agency. I wouldn't bet on that scenario in the next couple of years. On the other hand, nothing in life or business stays the same.

Should competitors be concerned that Destinations on Google is a harbinger of Google's global takeover of trip-planning and the travel industry? Don't be paranoid. Plenty of companies can out-compete Google but its dominance of search and ability to make traffic disappear on a dime are ongoing headaches given that the playing field tilts toward Mountain View, California.

Google is already the dominant player in travel advertising but now, after four years of acquisitions and product development, the search giant is finally integrating its flight and hotel products and becoming the booking power some feared.

Yelp's frustrating attempt to push users from the mobile web to its smartphone app has apparently paid off.

25 Moments that Mattered in 2015: To make our selection of 25 moments, we thought back to the stories that drove reader engagement and sparked discussion among both travel experts and the general public. Some stories were quick blips that represented bigger things while others were narratives that built slowly through out the year. Each one, though, spoke to where we are right now when it comes to the big business of global travel.