You could almost feel the air being sucked out of the room as Oliver Heckmann of Google closed off Day 1 of Phocuswright Dublin with a talk on everything the world’s largest search engine was doing in travel. I sensed everyone was grappling with the massive implications everyone of its products would have on their individual businesses.
Starting off with a personal story on how technology has raised consumer intolerance – knowing something (in his case, Uber) is there and not being able to use it because of government regulations in Germany, he said, “What you used to accept for 12 years suddenly becomes intolerable.”
He then went on to share how the world was going mobile. Between last quarter 2015 and first quarter 2016, there’s been an almost 40% increase in mobile searches in travel, mobile’s share of visits to travel sites increased to 40%, there’s been a continual decrease in time per visit on travel mobile websites and there’s been a 10% increase in mobile conversion rates on travel mobile sites.
What this was doing was creating more micro-moments. He then went on to list everything Google was doing to capture every one of our micro-moments in travel – so that it can become our personal travel assistant.
Destinations on Google – he called it an upper funnel product which would allow you and me to snack on, and compare, destination content. He said Google had seen high engagement on visual and video content, and the propensity to click on other places to explore was high.
“We are optimising still but it’s been well received by partners, users and media.”
Planet Trip – this will allow us in real time to explore the real cost of getting somewhere and staying there. To do this, Google is calculating trillions of price updates in air and hotel. “It’s massive technology work.”
Eventually, it will evolve this product to show packaged content and it’s working with small operators, OTAs and packaged tour operators. “We will build package exploration into Planet Trip soon, watch this space.”
Google Flights – it’s evolving to become more powerful in the upper funnel, at the exploration stage.
Hotels Search – there will be a Tip feature to tell us if we are missing out on special deals, we can compare prices against historical prices and coming soon, we will be able to ask – “pet friendly hotels for another $300 more”.
Then there’s Book On Google. He reassured the room that Google is not becoming an OTA. This was about improving conversion rates on mobile. Instead of sending people away, it’s about sending them to Google partner sites. “The partner is in full control of the customer relationship, it’s clearly branded.”
And it’s launching Book On Google with Amoma Hotels.
I listened to all this with a sinking feeling in my heart. Many startups have tried travel planning, they have failed. Upper funnel is the hardest to monetise. But if anyone can do this better than anyone without having to make money from it as an individual business, it’s Google. They control most of the world’s information, let alone travel content. They have the technological prowess.
Their flight search hasn’t been the most robust – their acquisition of ITA Software many years ago hasn’t produced the monster everyone had feared – and it allowed many travel metas to come into the picture. Skyscanner is now one of Europe’s small handful of travel unicorns.
I thought about their hotel search and how it would allow me to not only compare prices but historical prices – will this make me more anxious? Damn, I should have travelled last week, not this week. Did I miss out on this really good deal because I couldn’t get my act together? I thought about Trivago, another of Europe’s travel success stories.
I thought about how airlines and hotels were all desperately trying to differentiate themselves on the web and and here’s Google commoditising everything because that’s what Google does. It flattens everything down to the lowest common denominator – and usually that denominator is price.
Will I Book on Google? Frankly, it’s hard to change consumer behaviour – we are used to searching on Google, not buying on Google. But what if we get so caught up in Google’s Travel Planet because it makes it so easy for us that we can’t ever leave – thoughts of Truman Show came into my mind.
By the time he got to the last piece, thoughts of George Orwell’s 1984 were going through my head.
My Trips – this will process all the emails we receive from airlines and hotels in our Gmail In Box. Google will aggregate all the information, show up My Trips in Calendar and Maps. It will improve the map experience for us, show us our check in and check out date, departure information, it will be in Google Now and Android wear.
This will cover us until the day of travel – and then, when we get there, Google’s working on the My Trips app, an in-destination app, that last mile everyone’s trying to crack – from Expedia to Airbnb to TripAdvisor.
It will take the information from My Trips and make it available in the app. You can use it both online or offline. It will help you plan what you want to do in a destination and there will be dynamic links, depending on weather and your moods, the ranking will change. It will tell us where to eat, drink, visit. It will have editors’ travel tips.
There’s no guarantee of course that the My Trips app will work – many have tried to be our “travel buddy on the go” – but as Heckmann replied later to a question, “There’s no reason why it won’t work. We have a strong engineering and product team behind it.”
I then thought of what someone once said when asked how travel companies could ever compete against Google and he said, “Do what Google cannot do.”
From this talk, it seems there’s not much Google isn’t doing in travel. What will this do to innovation and diversity? Will this dampen the travel startup scene that’s just starting to flourish in Asia? Some startups will jump at the opportunity to work with Google of course – you can’t ignore travel’s most important customer acquisition platform.
But it is because of this very fact that we in travel cannot ignore what Google is doing in our industry. Will the top travel spenders on Google continue feeding the hand that seems to be taking bigger bites or will they find continue finding alternative means? Once you’re hooked on a drug, it’s hard to get off it.
As someone working in travel and tending to favour the underdog, I found myself asking should I stop using Google, should I stop using Gmail, am I giving too much power to this company? Is that even possible given how our lives are so intertwined with Google these days? Am I being paranoid?
I know it’s not new, this travel vs Google thing – there’s no conference you go to that this topic isn’t mentioned – but for the first time, as the world goes mobile and we become more isolated with our devices and there’s one company that controls most of our information, it’s time for all of us to take this moment of reckoning seriously and decide what we want to do about it, as consumers and as business owners.
Reactions from the industry, Part 2 coming up