Google has steadily but surely made its way into the travel sector with the acquisition of a number of companies and websites, as well as the establishment of its own web based services. The web giant started its march in 2011 and, in the two years following this has greatly expanded its offerings. Most recently and, arguably, most prominently, it has released and updated its Google Hotels service. Does this spell the end for direct bookings and booking websites?
Google Hotel Finder, launched in 2011, can now reasonably be considered the first step and this was followed by the acquisition of Zaggat in the same year. 2012 also saw the launch of Google Flight Search and Flight Explorer as well as the purchase of Frommer’s. However, it is Google Hotels that could have the biggest influence on the sector.
Google Hotel Finder enables users to search for hotels in a particular town or area. It has recently added a feature that allows users to search according to the time they want to stay. Travel time search further enables the user to find hotels that are within a specific travel time of a particular location. What’s more, integration with Google Maps not only makes the service a beneficial and easy to use tool but it also means that it will gain considerable mobile attention as people search for nearby hotels while on the move.
With user ratings and reviews, as well as these features, the evidence points to the fact that Google Hotel Finder is, to all intents and purposes, already a booking website. Google themselves will deny this, pointing to the fact that their users are directed to the hotel website or provided with contact details and will need to make bookings directly with the hotel.
There is criticism of this Google service. Google Hotel results appear at the top of search engine results pages and, in a lot of cases, this means that the hotel’s own websites appear low down the list. However, it does mean that searches that would ordinarily bring up a booking website are more likely to bring up details from the Google index.
It remains to be seen whether Google can take over the hotel booking industry completely but the signs are ominous for Trivago and Hotels.com. Once Google has its eye on a particular niche or industry they do tend to keep pushing until they have a major market share. Chrome has become one of the most popular browsers, Google Docs is a serious contender to Microsoft’s Office suite, and Google+ has made serious inroads into the social marketing industry too, although Facebook certainly isn’t dead in the water just yet!
