When the Google behemoth speaks about travel, as one official did during the company’s third quarter conference call yesterday, we listen.
But, all we got were more generalities and little substance about Google’s intentions in the travel vertical.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president of product management, was discussing chrome [not the browser] toasters and Google’s efforts to improve the shopping vertical.
“Real estate, finance, and travel are also other areas that we’re going to get quite focused on and obviously we will also continue to improve Google horizontally,” Rosenberg said.
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We didn’t get much substance from Rosenberg. We’ve been waiting to learn more about the focus for at least four or five years.
Google, of course, already has a huge travel-advertising business, but we’ll have to twiddle our thumbs some more to learn where the renewed travel focus will take Google and the travel industry.
In other travel news from the conference call, Google CFO Patrick Pichette said in the U.K. the travel vertical “did kind of OK.”
“So I think that there are signs of increasing consumer confidence and you think of Q3, Q4, the travel vertical or the retail vertical, they did kind of OK,” Pichette said. “So it’s not like the U.K. is in a nose dive. The U.K. is holding its own is the best way to portray it.”
Google got 13 percent of its total revenue from the U.K. in the third quarter, and gets a little more than half of its revenue from outside the U.S.
For the third quarter, in which Google recorded a tidy profit of $1.64 billion, cost per click decreased 6 percent compared with the third quarter of 2008, but it is trending upward sequentially. In other words, cost per click rose 5 percent from the second quarter to the third quarter in 2009.
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I think everyone is getting tired of waiting to see what Google is going to do with travel. Like you said, there doesnt seem to be to be too much substance coming from the Google camp. I saw a by-product of this when I wrote an article about Google Travel on my own site and got a flood of visits.
Come on Google, spill!
Why should they get involved in travel, or change their search to help users find travel sites in a different way to how they find sites in other industries.
The great thing about online travel is the number of innovative websites that are popping up, with there being a hell of a lot more than price to take into consideration when choosing which site to use (e.g. content, tools, community), with price parity becoming more common each day.
I think Bing have taken a closed minded approach by providing meta-search results. Meta-search sites are great, but they are not for everyone and are limited (i.e. limited to sites which they have been manually programmed to scrape and do not differentiate these sites in any way other than price).
If Google were to start controlling the user experience up until they are ready to book, it would severely stifle innovation (we all know most traffic comes from organic search engine traffic). This goes against what Google is all about.
Just my 2c