Sharing The Travel Industry's latest Technology
Posts tagged google
All Hail Our Google Overlords
Oct 27th
A recent comment by Stephen Budd raised my awareness about how involved the Internet is becoming in our day to day lives. I use Google services everyday in my life, from email, search, maps and public transit. I like the company and I feel that they have profoundly altered the way that humans access and interpret information. Some people however, are starting to feel that Google has gone too far. If you search ‘Google’ the quoted term “Google Overlord” for instance, it will bring up over 8700 instances.
Is there a Google backlash? A little.
Are they still making money? Over $4 Billion a year in profit.
They have just launched their first mobile OS equipped phone, their first satellite, their own browser, and basically own online video, free email, online advertising, and oh yeah, the search world. So now they know what you are looking for, they know where you are, who you are talking to, and can take a photo of you where ever you are. This brother is getting bigger! Andrew Keen, a British-born author and entrepreneur in California’s Silicon Valley said, “‘They have amassed more information about people in 10 years than all the governments of the world put together.”
Look no further then Kevin May and company’s Travolution blog to see how the travel industry is taking to Google’s recent changes to their advertising model. Seems like travel folks are starting to feel peeved.
Well it turns out that the travel folks are not alone, the Guardian released this article highlighting some of the Pros and Cons of a Google world.
This is not to say that I am against Google, but that I am starting to be aware of its impact in my life, could you go a day/week/month with out it? I don’t think I could, and that is mildly concerning.
The 3 Ingredients For The Perfect Travel Storm
Jul 2nd
According to Sebastian Junger, a perfect storm is when many smaller effects come together to have a greater effect then the effects individual elements. Wikipedia states that it has grown to mean “any event where a combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically.”
What does this mean for the travel industry? What events are coming together to facilitate drastic changes?
These are questions that PhoCusWright will be addressing at their annual conference, this year in Hollywood. They are focusing on the new ways that consumers Search, Shop, and Buy travel products through the Internet. This started my thinking, and here are some areas that I have noticed that will be the big movers of this perfect storm:
1. Semantic Travel – With everyone and their dog online, it is becoming increasingly hard to make travel booking decisions due to the sheer magnitude of content on the web. Semantic structuring of search attempts to disseminate all of the information, pricing and reviews that are the most relevant for your interests and present it to you in a concise format. Look at sites like UpTake.com for an example of where semantic vertical search is today. This will be the new Meta-search.
UPDATE: Yen and Tom just presented at TIS at PhoCusWright. They did a great job and reassured me that they are creating order out of the mess of information out there.
2. Google - With integrated flight search that has preferential placement of OTAs, Google is moving closer and closer to fully marketing travel products. They have out maneuvered Microsoft on the Yahoo bid, and now own online advertising, it is fair to anticipate some major shake ups from this daring company.
3. Free – Chris Anderson is coming out with another industry shaking book, Free!. He uses Google, Craigslist and Wikipedia as cases for the new economics of the Internet. Apply these same tenets to the Travel Industry and some interesting things will happen. Rezgo, (our product) for example has just released a Free Online booking solution for Tour and Activity suppliers, this has the potential to enable all of the longtail suppliers to sell their products through our partner OTAs as well as their own site. There is a lot of potential here.
What do you think will contribute to this new Perfect Storm for travel?
Google + Travel = Troogle?
Dec 11th
Tim Armstrong just finished his talk on Google and Travel at the PhoCusWright conference in Orlando. His talk was an overview of the industry and gave some great insights on how Google was working towards optimizing the user experience.
He gave a background into Google’s “The wisdom of crowds†philosophy; letting the brainpower of the world make your product better. He stated “If you don’t have the wisdom of the crowds in your business, then you are missing a major piece of business.”
Google strives to use the wisdom of the crowds to connect the right consumer, at the right place at the right time with the right process and right product. The product he was focusing on is Travel.
Google values the travel market and handles 22% of all Travel all inquiries. That is quite huge, of the billions of the travel postings out there, 22% of them originate with Google.
Tim broke peoples searches down to the their life patterns, in that people get different types of information at differing times in the day. For example:
6am Morning Info – browse blogs and news items
7am Drive time commute – Radio and Blackberry
Google is trying to connect with the consumers with their mechanical day and several of their products (reader, gmail, blogsearch, news) help facilitate that.
Tim was then faced by an industry panel consisting of:
- Rob Torres, Managing Director, Travel, Google Inc.
- Jim Kovarik, GM of AOL Travel
- Jasper Malcolmson, Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo! Travel and Shopping
Jasper Malcolmson asked the question that was on my mind, “Troogle? When are you getting into the travel business?”
Tim -
“I don’t think there will be a Troogle. There are some spaces that are clear, and they anticipate that. Google would have a hard time doing super specific business. We would love to get travel info to the customer faster, but they are not planning on tackling the market specifically.”
Do you buy it, will we see Google selling travel anytime soon?
Lure, Sample, Buy: The New Destination Marketing Mix
Jul 4th
Nova Scotia is leading the way in destination advertising. They recently released this article
that covers their new strategy to attract web friendly tourists. The three tenets that they use in their marketing efforts are lure, sample, buy.
They lure guests with traditional media like news paper, and TV spots. These ads direct them to the NovaScotia.com website. The website has Google Earth tags that relay information on some of the major destinations in the province. These tags coordinate with video vignettes on the web site. This allows potential tourists to get a taste of the culture before they arrive.
Guests of the site will then have the option to find flight information and start the process of buying their next vacation.
This process really reminds me of the Prosumer video that was hosted on the Travel and Marketing 2.0 blog. Travel is all about experience, and the more that consumers can taste the experience before they commit, the more likely they are to buy.