Google’s entry into the hotel business is shaping up — literally.
Google is testing Google Hotel Finder, a tool that enables you to edit shapes within an area of a city to depict where you might want to stay, and delivers Google Places reviews and advertisements from online travel agencies to book the properties.
Google Hotel Finder, launched as an experiment in the U.S. only, has some googlish features which appear to be unique.
You access the tool here and if you click on or enter “Las Vegas,” you’ll see a listing of 60 hotels and an image to the left to depict the spotlighted area like this:
Then, if you click on “edit shape” you can manipulate the spotlighted area into the following shape, for instance, and expand the hotel roster to 80 hotels, if you wish:
You can, of course, narrow the shape to focus on a few streets etc.
When you scroll or mouse through the spotlighted area and click on one of the blue dots, it identifies the hotel. For example, you can view a pop-up about the Super 8 Las Vegas with a star rating, user rating, hotel description, reviews by Google users from Google Places, hotel photos and a “book” button.
Clicking on the “book” button brings you Google hotel price ads from Agoda, Priceline, Expedia, Booking.com, hotels.com, Travelocity and the hotel website.
Interestingly, all of the online travel agencies show the price as $39 per night while Travelocity shows the rate as $189 per night as the base rate. (Must be Travelocity gremlins at work.)
Give Google some credit, too, on the transparency front.
Google shows each OTAs’ total price for the room, including taxes and fees, at first glance, although the total price is in a smaller typeface than the base rates in bold. Google shows no price from the hotel website, which presumably is not an advertiser.
The integation of the ads is convenient for the user, if not a bit distracting — the ads are overlayed onto the hotel photos.
Another interesting feature not seen elsewhere is a “Compared to typical” column in the hotel listings.
For each property, Google provides a percentage showing how the hotel price on your desired dates compares with the hotel’s “typical price over the last year.”
So you can see, for example, that the five-star Wynn Las Vegas’ $159 rate for a stay on Aug. 4 is 34% cheaper than its typical rate over the last year, and the three-star Wyndham Grand Desert’s $181 rate for the same night is 70% higher than its norm.
There are lots of other tools, too, including a “shortlist” feature which enables you to compile a list of hotels under consideration.
HotelFinder is described in the Google Search blog as “an early experiment” which is “currently only available for locations in the U.S.”
Hi Den,
I like the unique features too, listed them here. http://etb.ht/hotelfinder
The individual hotels can only be shown up with prices, if they work with a CRS (eg Trust international) that is connected to Google hotel price ads. They are not able to set up individual api’s, because of the magnitude of the queries they do. Also, having all hotels hooking up individually would be madness.
Wonder how the competition will hold when this rolls out.
Nice lede, spot-on analysis. As usual.
Seems more of a gimmick than something truly practical, but glad to see any innovation.
Wouter: Thanks for pointing out. I think Pegasus Solutions is getting involved with that, too.
Sean: Yes, it sure is nice to see something different. I’m tired of all the sameness.
Very Interesting…Thank you for sharing
Bit gimmicky. Can’t quite see the point of the moveable square, though, looks like a “Hey, I have just thought up this movebale square thing, let’s put that on” (You know, a bit like the “Never touch a germy (sic) pump again – we have this bit of technology and we are damn well going to use it” – syndrome)
Needs working on – prices are not that clever. I tried a few experiments and came out cheaper in each case – quite a bit cheaper, in fact – not to mention that (with an agent) you don’t have to pay upfront, you pay when you leave. Funnily enough, using the (eg Holiday Inn Express) own prices via Sabre rather than those through (eg) Expedia prices were significantly higher on the website than the CRS. So, you will only get those prices from sites that are prepared to cough up some money to Google – not exactly transparent, eh?
… but then, Hey! I am a travel agent, so what do I know about it…
1) Like the concept of multiple user-defined polygons, although UI will probably need more refinement to get broad usage. Currently need to zoom a lot and Google Maps tool offers only partial navigational feature set.
Benefit: Searching only for 4-star hotels located around Beverly Hills, West Hollywood & Santa Monica, can eliminate a lot of noise from search results.
2) Like the shortlist tool – able to flag properties both inside & outside defined polygons to catch outliers.
Benefit: Overcomes limitation of only being able to highlight quadrilaterals using existing tool set.
3) Like that hotel owner website is included as option when booking button is clicked – even if the price is not presented because the hotel is not associated with Switch/GDS for booking (see @Wouter’s comment.)
Benefit: Helps level the playing field and appease hoteliers concerned Google would require them to outbid OTA’s on CPC basis to sell own properties.
4) Like the Degree of Discount slider concept. Helps user find deals relative to typical pricing. Thinking this area will need refinement as day of week & seasonality issues create a challenge of defining typical pricing.
Benefit: Helps consumers more easily identify deals.
5) Not liking that platform still appears buggy. Four Seasons Beverly Wilshire indicated rate of $161 and discount of 66% (knew that couldn’t be right) when hovering over map push-pin, but when booking button clicked. Actual rate was $475 through Hotel site, Expedia & Hotels.com. Same issue applied to Montage Beverly Hills.
In all, some nice new features, but not really integrated into an easy to use consumer-friendly platform as yet. Similar to situation ITA Software had for years with its Matrix time bar display – useful for experts, but it took Hipmunk to refine & simplify the UI to gain broader consumer acceptance.
The next logical step would be for Google to introduce a summary results page with the polygon filtered & shortlisted hotels listed with pricing to improve side-by-side comparison and eliminate need to drill down individually (however, with Google being paid on a per-click basis, I don’t blame them for creating a UI that requires clicks to secure additional information, but for broader searches, meta-search approach is better for user.)
where is the innovation?
IMO – nice job.
The key innovation here is this:
From the Google blog: “To help you figure out where the action is, Hotel Finder shines a “tourist spotlight” on the most visited areas of U.S. cities. We select an initial shape for you based on what’s most popular…”
Has there been anyone else offering this useful information and easy to use tool? I haven’t found them.
Looking at this from a customer’s perspective rather than travel industry insider, geek perspective helps.
@Joe Buhler Yes Hipmunk has done this on their Hotelscombined whitelabel. It offers shopping, nightlife and such. It’s not accurate in European cities I found.
Understanding that this is an early roll-out of a new product, there are a few things that the product could use that would better serve the consumer.
- It would be nice to see the polygon building capability enhanced along the lines of what http://www.wikimapia.org can support. They allow for more than just 4 corners in their polygons. That capability would really help Google’s roll-out in Europe where MSA/city/neighborhood layouts are non-traditional.
- The three major CRS providers (Pegasus, Sabre Hospitality Solutions and Trust International) all have interfaces to distribute hotel pricing. If those interfaces were enhanced to send more hotel content Google would gain access to additional content that consumers could query. For example, they could implement an amenity filter, similar to Kayak’s hotel search product. Much of the hotel’s content that is published via interfaces like HOD & HCD could be utilized in this product.
- Link to the hotel’s place page. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough, but I didn’t see a link to the hotel’s place page. For hotel’s that have claimed their place page and maintain comprehensive data this seems like a waste.
Overall it seems like a framework for a more powerful hotel search tool. I’ve already become reliant on Google Maps for my leisure bookings, so this will likely be my go-to product.
Having had a chance to look at this a bit – you know, it is fundamentally wrong. Google is perceived as being a source of information – not advertising. There is a fine line twixt the two, I know – but this site should say that “Rates are taken from selected sites” (being a euphamism for those that we own or pay us to be here).
It is fundamentally misleading to suggest, in any way, that the rates offered are the lowest… especially as in certain examples I have looked it, this is not the case. I would venture (and have no reason to believe otherwise) that even the “typical” prices are also taken from the same sources. One would have thought the Advertising Standards Authority may want to have a closer look at this.
Prime example of techys getting hold of something in travel and throwing a lot of technology at it, without a thought of consequence (or, indeed, understanding of travel)
Joe Buhler: Here’s one: http://hotpads.com/pages/features/lassoSearch.htm.
Nice Job, well done Google
My thoughts:
1) Based on the blog, they appear to only be surfacing the google places reviews (can someone confirm?). I think this could be much more powerful with improved (read: multi-platform) review aggregation & search.
2) The price listings are anything but compelling. Few of the “owner site” prices were displayed, and I would much prefer to search and book through Kayak where I have a far better sense of transparency.
I find it particularly interesting that the launch of the Hotel Finder coincided with the start of new rules for local ads, especially AdWords Express ads. Apparently it was a test as it’s not valid already, but it showed that Google is having really big plans regarding local advertising.