Comments on: Experiment to Freak Out Expedia and Hotels.com

By: Dataceptionist

Dataceptionist — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:26:27 +0000

As someone who was looking for accomodation in a fairly rural area, only yesterday, this feature would have been GOLD.

BUT, they would still need to choose which of the Hotels.com etc websites to go with, as I noticed that of the 4-5 I tried, it only yeilded say 3-4 accomodation options in the area, but across all the websites they weren't the same hotels.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:20:36 +0000

Its an interesting experiment. Google will need to have a full blown Booking Engine to do the proper job. Taking its prices from website pages is not structured and can be processed into a quotation that includes latest specials, family and group rates, seasonal pricing and tax.

Google knows this, so what is its next move. They might do well to acquire a travel shopping system like our own AXSES arcRes.com. See more about the Next generation shopping at http://tourismPlatform.com

By: Jean-Francois Noel

Jean-Francois Noel — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:30:55 +0000

For now I see Google taking care to do the experiment with the OTA. It seems obvious to me that going directly to the hotels official site would be better, but too menacing for now.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:28:10 +0000

Search engines always have the prerogative of changing how they index the Web. SEO theory teaches us that optimization can come from any of the three parts of the searchable Web ecosystem: Searchers can change their queries, Publishers can change their content (including links), and Indexers can change the way they index the Web.

This is a normal part of the process.

By: Rich A

Rich A — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:23:21 +0000

Remember the good old days when Google tried to direct you to another website as fast as possible? Now everything they release is intended to keep you on Google.com longer. I guess I can’t hate on this, from a user prospective this one actually seems helpful.

By: Artyom Diogtev

Artyom Diogtev — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:00:55 +0000

From a point of view of a person who’s been planing his May short-term vacation I would like to have such feature available on Google Maps to save some $$$ – no doubts about it. But from Expedia’s point of view I can imagine what “excitement” they may experience reading this Google blog post

By: app developer

app developer — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:47:07 +0000

I can see that hotels would take very kindly to Google removing the arbitrage market and how people searching for a hotel would welcome it too.
Possibly better than the market – the Expedia share price – http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EXPE… I’m sure the downward movement is purely coincidental!

By: Kevin May

Kevin May — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:13:29 +0000

Hi John,

It's a very interesting move by Google - dare I say it a "game-changer".

Our analysis (sorry for the blatant link to our story):

http://www.tnooz.com/2010/03/23/news/google-maps-adds-hotel-search-and-pricing-panic-and-confusion-assured/

What we are hearing is that the pressure may not be so much on the OTAs or aggregators but metasearch engines, as Google is effectively metasearching products from PPC ads.