A sampling of responses to Google’s talk yesterday at Phocuswright Dublin.
Rod Cuthbert, CEO, Rome2rio
“Google’s relentless push to replace existing travel intermediaries with their own solutions is bad news for the whole travel industry. Their key products — Flights, Hotels, Transit (for ground transportation) and the newly announced Destinations on Google — are all directly competitive with existing players who have spent years building their business online, spending billions of dollars on Google-based advertising along the way.
In response, Google says it is simply striving to deliver the best user experience, that user needs must always be paramount. The implication here is that sites like Expedia, Booking.com, Skyscanner, Tripadvisor, Viator, Rome2rio and the countless other intermediaries who have built this industry simply can’t do as good a job of selling travel as Google can itself. That’s a bit rich.
Google further defends its position by saying that all these intermediaries will have the opportunity to advertise within their new products. Let’s deconstruct that a little: do a search like “Paris hotels” and notice how Google’s Hotels result now occupies most of the prime results page real estate. Organic results from Trivago, Expedia, Tripadvisor and others are pushed down the page or over onto page two, where they may as well not display at all. Traffic that used to come from unpaid links will inevitably decline, leaving online players forced to rely entirely on direct traffic to their sites or paid traffic via Google’s ad programs.
Hotels and airlines might initially think this is a good trend, as it gives them an opportunity to be more prominent in Google results, and decreases their reliance on Booking, Expedia, and Trip. I don’t think so; instead it replaces the devils they know with the one they don’t know. Concentrating so much distribution power in the hands of one intermediary is a negative suppliers will have cause to regret.
To give Google their due, they have made a real effort to engage with the industry lately. That started with Oliver Heckmann outing himself as the real boss of Google Travel — how crazy that we didn’t know who was running the show until he put his hand up — and his clear commitment to engage with industry leaders in dialog about their plans.
How that dialog goes, and whether Google continues down its current path puts on the brakes, is an open question. The industry would do well to imagine a marketplace that is even more dominated by Google than it is today, and ask itself if that’s a future they want, or one which will stifle innovation and trample existing players.”
Stephan Ekbergh, CEO, Travelstart
“Nothing will be able to beat the seamless experience that Google can provide. But having used hotels and flights on Google Now for years, they go wrong often.
The content and services on applications developed outside Google is richer, lots more accurate and has depth that Google lacks. What Google’s products also seem completely oblivious to is style and personality.
Most great applications is a reflection of deep commitment and passion, Google seem obsessed by always wanting to fix something they consider broken.
When they bought ITA they wanted to fix flight search. If the industry is good at something, it’s flights and hotels search.
What worries Google is more the risk of them being disintermediated.
Google admits they want to move away from the world of linking and keeping people in their own environment and by this they are making everyone who plays this game into a content provider to Google.
It’s time to realise that everything that Google doesn’t control is broken at Googleplex. So much for “Don’t be evil.”
Johannes Reck, CEO and co-founder, GetYourGuide
“I think it (My Trips) will be a transformational product for travelers. If you are using Google Inbox today, you already get a taste of how well they can sort out your travel itinerary based on your e-mails threads.
Additionally Google has this wealth of data on restaurants, activities and other relevant in-destination information that they can match to your itinerary and refine based on your tastes.
I am extremely excited about the launch of this product and firmly believe that it will be a tremendous opportunity for anyone selling in-destination products. So far accurate targeting has been the number one challenge for platforms such as GYG. Google Trips would solve this problem in an elegant way!”