A job listing for a Google Senior Account Executive, Travel Vertical made a ZDNet Blog think that Google intends to launch a booking feature, Google Travel. They even imagine how Google Travel would integrate with Google Videos (to promote destinations), Google Talk (click-to-call feature for listed hotels, restaurants) and Google AdSense."Your main responsibility is to drive new business revenue growth with our Fortune 1000 advertisers in a specified vertical [my note: travel vertical] in one or more regions" the job listing mentions.
For now, when you enter two cities in your query, Google links to third-parties travel planning and flight-booking sites (Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz), but the experience isn't very good: these flight-booking sites have slow search engines and intrusive ads.
I concur. Most travel search engines today are not effective at delivering what the customer wants.
ReplyDeleteThere is a need for a holistic search engine that is flexible and can display multiple options according to the cusotmers needs (e.g., Return best flight deals from SFO to multiple locations). Sometimes if a customer can find a cheap flight from their nearby airport they may be more inclined to make trips to places they didn't originally plan to go - because of the great deal.
Somebody needs to step up and make a solid travel search engine. Is that someone Google?
Agreed. I actually just looked for Google Travel, hoping that it existed. I imagines something like Google Products, where if you type in the starting place and destination you could get prices on Air, Bus, and Train fares simultaneously and decide which mode to use.
ReplyDeleteOr, better even, search for the cheapest combined route. I wouldn't mind switching from flight to train if it's cheaper than only trains or just on flight.
ReplyDeleteayman i hoped it does actually excist ,i would love to have every thing google ,please add it up soon
ReplyDeletei was thinking the same way for years for a similar project for my island using google but i do not know who to contact to talk my ideas to develop this website.If anyone can help me please contact me at alvinangela@hotmail.com
ReplyDeleteThe way these companies are setting up prices it seems they a involved in
ReplyDeletea price fixing game big time !!!!!
You should talk to Peter Norvig in Google to make Google Travel happen.
ReplyDeleteTravel search is much more difficult than most people think. It reminds more corporate search where there is multitude of data sources with different data formats.
ReplyDeleteMost of travel data is exposed to the web non-systematically or not exposed at all.
However - it is doable with significant engineering and maintenance effort. Not sure if Google sees it as priority though.
The market consolidates though. For flight search we can see sites like skyscanner and kayak, for hotels expedia or hotelscombined, car hire - cartrawler etc.
At the right point Google may buy a few of them to enter the market.
Until then - I wouldn't expect much
jarkoles/nospam/@hotmail.com