Google is testing a new function that automatically crawls a Gmail user’s in-box to fetch hotel reservation confirmation e-mails and then spotlight those confirmations in natural search results when the user runs an ordinary Google.com search on a phrase like “my reservations.”
This is the next phase in a trial that began in August, when Google began testing a service that searches a Gmail user’s in-box to find flight reservation confirmations and then displays select details from the e-mail in a box above or to the right of the results after an routine search on a phrase like “my flights.”
Now Google is expanding the test to hotel reservations, among other things. The company announced the hotel reservation experiment yesterday.
Participants in the field trial can now search for the phrase “my hotel reservation” via google.com and the search engine will fetch a list of recent hotel reservations from select hotels. As of today, you have to be a US user and sign up to participate in the Google Field Trial to see the results, th0ugh not all participants in the field trial are yet able to see this functionality.
Obviously, if the field trial is successful, the feature may be rolled out to all users on desktop and mobile browsers.
For a couple of months now, Google has crawled user Gmail accounts for hotel and flight reservations for Google Now on Android devices, which lets you sign up for push alerts of relevant flight delays and hotel check-out.
Other search options include “my restaurant reservations” if a user booked through OpenTable. People with tickets booked via Ticketmaster or Eventbrite can search for “my events” to see relevant event information. Searching on “my purchases” with fetch your latest Amazon orders.
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About Sean O'Neill
Ownership of the client (who owns you!)…
For Apple, it is in the client’s credit card data (iTunes, App store, …),
For Booking.com, it is the email address (they stopped sending the guest’s email address to the hotels last October),
For Facebook, it is the data in private conversations & interests,
For Google, it is in their Gmail boxes. They can now build-up their own database of hotels, restaurant clients and serve them paid (by hotels & restaurant) advertising. Some day, they might drop Booking.com & their adwords budget & go direct to take bookings….
Interesting observations!
Gratefully,
Sean
It’s definitely about who owns the customer and their data. Some hotel franchises have taken it a step further and limit what information a franchised hotel sees about their customer.
I guess for now it’s up to the end user to figure out which one of these many services they want to use for their information. Data security will also gain importance.