In a span of just a few months, Google’s threat in booking travel is looming even larger. Indeed, Skift said last October Google’s new hotel search is presenting a greater threat to booking rivals. Now the tech giant has added a full-fledged destination site for hotels, without any major fanfare, and has potential implications for booking sites, as well as Airbnb, on the lines of what it has done with its already very-popular Google Flights.
Richard Holden, Google’s vice president of product management, travel, wrote about the new features in Google Flights and Hotels in a blog published late last week, and quietly slipped in a development we have been waiting for a year or so now, the full-fledged site for hotel meta search site and booking engine.
Once the users goes to Google’s hotel site and selects a hotel, a “Book a room” button is very prominent. When the user selects one of the online travel agency or other metasearch advertisers, the traveler navigates to the third-party site for booking. But there is often an option to book right on Google for Travelocity or Agoda, for example.
In an earlier February blog, Eric Zimmerman, Google’s director of travel product management said, “We’re evolving the way our hotel search works on smartphones to help users explore options and make decisions on their smallest screens. The new hotel search experience includes better price filtering, easier-to-find amenity information and the ability to book right from Google.”
Thus, if you’re going to Miami at the end of March, and there are over 300 hotel results for your search, you can now find the right hotel for your trip by applying a new “Deals” filter. This filter, said Holden, “uses machine learning to highlight hotels where one or more of our partners offer rates that are significantly lower than the usual price for that hotel or similar hotels nearby.”
