The right strategy for Google in Travel

It was a little hard to tell yesterday whether the rumors of a Google offer for my former employer, Expedia.com, where true or just an April Fool's Day joke.

As Rich Barton has pointed out, Google already does a pretty good job monetizing travel, by getting each competing vendor to pay for clicks during the search process.

But Google is doing a pretty poor job right now actually answering people's travel-related queries.  Type in "Maui condo spring break", and you'll be given the usual 10 Blue Links as search results, plus some pay-per-click ads.  That experience is quite a hassle for consumers.

What you really want when you type in "Maui condo spring break" is for Google to ask you if you know your dates, what price range you want to pay, and what amenities you might want, then present the results on the following page.

Instead of buying a travel intermediary, Google should immediately embrace and/or publish a set of microformats or more detailed specs for travel availability and resource search.  When someone goes to Google and wants to do an airfare search, Google should syndicate out this search to a series of subscriber-services that have registered with it.  The structured data that returns can be ordered in whatever way Google wants (yes, probably including promotional billing and/or things like paying for a thumbnail image or embedded video). 

In this way, Google could make lots of consumers happy and take the economic rents that are currently owned by many travel intermediaries, whether it's Expedia, Priceline, Travelocity, Sidestep, or others.

Suppliers too benefit tremendously when this happens, since the connection to searching consumers is much more direct.

Comments

[TourPro]

I kind of think they like the current strategy of making the OTA's pay for clicks.

It would be awesome to be able to do a "Kayak" search via Google.

[Steve Murch]

Thanks TourPro. The challenge for Google though is that their competition won't stand still. If Google is falling short in answering people's travel search questions -- and I believe they are -- then other competitors that do it better will become known as the go-to place for travel search.

I think Google probably realizes this and will ultimately be forced to be more than a click-through seller on a hunt-and-peck for the right trip. Their stated strategy of "organizing the world's information" recognizes this, and has certainly come to grips with a world in which searching is more and more precise.

What I'm suggesting is that offsetting this potential revenue-loss-due-to-precision, they could take a bunch of traffic from the OTA's and other intermediaries by opening up their search engine via some kind of event-delegation mechanism (here, I mean event-delegation in the computer science sense, not the political sense :-)). That is, when an event occurs in Google Search like "Show me all the Maui condos for spring break", then Google syndicates it out to the various API's that have registered with it.