Google recently made the travel industry sit up and listen with the map hotel pricing “experiment” – but in a far stealthier move it is looking at turning the screw further.
The addition of room prices against search results for hotels on Google Maps triggered the inevitable rounds of soul-searching and claims of we-did-it-first, while the most telling remarks concerned when the search giant might do the same in organic search results.
Now it appears such a move is being tested quietly on a few users.
On Google Canada this week a search for “hotels” threw up and wholly unexpected set of results.
A search for the same keyword delivered a different – yet still intriguing – set of results.
These two searches were conducted on a Google Chrome browser from a Canadian IP. When the user attempted to recreate the same results by opening a new tab the results returned were of the standard organic variety.
This looks like typical A/B testing.
Despite the top left-hand navigation looking different and the inclusion of a location widget underneath the search bar, it is the inclusion of room prices included in the results that is arguably the most interesting.
There is no date setting widget included on the page, such as that incorporated into the Google Maps hotel test, so prices are probably taken from average room rates for a particular hotel – once again, presumably, from advertisers in AdSense.
Initially, Google remarked that the screen grabs were from Google Shopping – a service which includes prices but is obtained by filtering results AFTER an initial search is been carried out.
These results may well be from Google Shopping but were returned after a single search query from the Google homepage. The user had no predetermined search preferences, but perhaps in this case Google decided that for a term which has plenty of price points available it should throw up something different, including options for more shopping.
An official at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, says:
“At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on Google sites all over the world.”
Google also pointed to a blog post about how it tests various projects around the Google ecosystem.
So, just a test, nothing to see, please move along…
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About Kevin May
Big news Kevin. I thought it was interesting that they highlight “this site aggregates prices from multiple stores.” Is this a more general e-commerce feature that is somehow automatically applied to travel websites by accident? I suspect this is not a travel specific feature because of the terminology
@elliott – indeed, big news.
i’m with you on this one, not necessarily a travel-specific feature, but moreover a way of automatically feeding in “shopping” results into organic search.
either way, it’s a major move.
One of the most comprehensive articles I have seen on the subject. Well done. I would be very interested to see where google is going with this, as this doesn’t look like the usual consumer behavioural analysis they tend to do.
I can’t imagine them getting it right all the time, and hoteliers are likely to be rather unhappy with not-so-accurate price indications, just like consumers. In fact, this reminds me of the next gen seamless battle of the CRSs…
The future is interesting
@yannis – interesting point you make about not-so-accurate prices.
One of our Nodes asks whether non-date specific price comparison (using average room rates) is *good enough* in order to make a decision between other hotels.
It would be interesting how accurate the rates get.. Hotel chains now actively ensure the competitive BAR (Best Available Rates) reach their guests, so far as to procure rate checking tools to monitor any disparity or competitive disadvantages. Google could make these rate comparison tools obsolete?
Nicely documented A/B Testing!