The service is a project from Google Crisis Response disseminates information around natural and humanitarian disasters.

The project is also supported by Google.org which aims to take the best of Google’s search and technology capabilities to help address global challenges.

Currently the service only features weather and earthquake information but the search giant is keen to incorporate alerts from ‘authoritative trusted sources’ that provide information on other crises.

Less of a ‘don’t travel’ planning tool than a travel planning tool but useful for a travel industry that is no stranger to dealing with crises.

It’s not the first time the search giants maps have been combined with crisis information with Visit Florida using Google Maps to show areas affected by the oil spill in 2010.

And, last year the UK’s Guardian newspaper plotted government travel advice on the maps.

Leveraging data about 500 global markets from the transportation systems in Google Transit, Google Hotel Finder now populates hotel results based on a 20-minute default distance from a point of interest.

For example, if you input Buckingham Palace into the Google Hotel Finder search box, it will populate hotel results with those properties within a 20-minute transit ride from the tourist attraction.

When you click on the map, you can see the Buckingham Palace represented by a red dot and that the London Marriott, Radisson Edward and Dominion Theatre are all within a 20-minute tube ride from Buckingham Palace.

Of course, you can manipulate the transit distance desired as you wish and use the feature to gauge the distance from convention centers and the sites of your business meetings, as well. If you move the slider to 15 minutes instead of 20 minutes, you will see a smaller subset of hotels and nearby attractions, for instance.

In regions, such as Buenos Aires, where Google doesn’t have public transit data available, Google provides walking distances instead of transit time.

And, in addition to searching for hotels by transit time or walking distance, you can also use Google Hotel Finder to search for hotels in a selected area or in a city’s most popular locations, Google notes in a blog post announcing the Google Hotel Finder tweaks.

Here are the countries and cities which Google covers with public transit data.

Google’s integration of transit data follows Hipmunk’s rollout of Google Calendar integration in October.

Hipmunk enables people to plot the location of business meetings on a Google Map and to view the distance to hotels which would be convenient for the business traveler.

Google’s approach is geared toward business and leisure travelers and ups the ante with transit data.

The partnership enables consumers to access rail travel information across the country and view it in map format.

The service includes train route and timetable information for more than 2,500 stations, 170,000 trips and 8,000 bus stops as well as walking directions and bus timetable information to enable passengers to work out potential connections.

Access to the public transport information is via a train icon on Google Maps and consumers can also click through to TheTrainline to make bookings.

Public transport information, including tube, bus and tram, for the Greater London area was launched last year via a partnership with Transport for London.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

We are a startup company based in southern Germany. Our first product was the German job search engine Opportuno. Opportuno has been launched in 2007 as a bootstrap with some radically new features (at the time) like advanced deep-web crawling and a user interface called “Instant View”, which can be seen as an early anticipation of what is now known as Google Instant.

Opportuno is still our main product. It is profitable and allows us to allocate resources to new ventures.

We started to work on cartographic hotel finders in 2009, mainly because we were unhappy with existing travel websites.

In 2010, we launched our first hotel finder called Hotelprise in Germany, which allowed us to build up knowledge and experience in the travel industry.

In December 2011, we launched HotelMaps, our first project with international focus.

Founders:

• Andreas Bogen – prior to founding Opportuno, Andreas worked for a global strategy consulting firm. Focus areas of his consulting work include innovation and growth as well as marketing for high-tech companies. Earlier in his career, Andreas worked for four years as a project and account manager in an international online agency. Andreas holds an MBA from the University of Cambridge, UK.
• Micheal Bogen – Michael is an experienced software engineer, specialized in large scale database applications and advanced web technologies. His prior work experience includes consulting and software development in the public and banking sector and database development at Oracle. Michael studied computer science in Germany and the USA.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

HotelMaps has been financed using free cash flow from our initial product, Opportuno.com.

What problem are you trying to solve?

It always bothered us that most hotel reservation and travel websites look and feel like they were designed ten years ago.

Overloaded with information and advertising, they show little focus on the user. Above all, we think the implementation of maps has often been neglected. A tiny map with dots marked with A, B, C and a corresponding table is not what we consider a user friendly solution.

This is particularly odd considering that the location is probably the most important information when booking a hotel, along with the room rate and category.

Describe the business, core products and services?

We built our hotel finder entirely on maps. Different from other recently launched map based hotel websites such as Hipmunk or Google’s own Hotel Finder, we want to show prices and star ratings directly on the map.

Since this is not possible with off-the-shelf solutions for Google maps, we had to develop an entirely new framework on top of Google maps.

Our technology allows us to put the most relevant information first. Each hotel icon on the map is marked with the room price and star rating. In areas where hotels are close together, icons are grouped into clusters to avoid overlaps.

Room rates and star ratings are permanently visible on the map, allowing the user to scan the most relevant information at a glance.

More than 200,000 hotels worldwide are available via HotelMaps. Once the user enters travel dates and hotel requirements, HotelMaps sources real-time room rates and availability data from more than 30 major travel sites and displays the best prices directly on the map.

Filters for price and ratings can be applied using sliders, which instantly change the results on the map.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

• Customers: OTAs and booking websites
• Users: Travelers looking for hotels – both for business and vacation

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We are a metasearch engine similar to Hipmunk, Trivago or Kayak. Thus we follow the same business model: our revenues are provisions from OTAs, which means we are profitable as long as our long term traffic acquisition costs stay below revenues.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We have developed a technical solution that cannot be copied overnight
• We are a small and flexible team, and we can adjust quickly to a changing environment

Weaknesses:

• We do not have celebrity investors or the financial resources of a huge corporation

Opportunities:

• We do have a USP in a huge and growing market

Threats:

• Google as a competitor
• Google as a search engine/ traffic source
• Google as the provider of Google Maps

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Most people actually like the idea and believe it will find its fans. Once a user is used to map-based search, it is hard to go back to the clogged tables of conventional hotel finders.

The main criticism we hear is that Google will dominate our market soon, leaving little room for small innovators.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Important metrics for success are, among others, the number of visits and the conversion rate. However, we do not publish specific target values or long-term goals. After all, one of our strengths is our flexibility.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

Here some of the hot topics of next year:

• Google Hotel Finder
• Metasearch and rate parity
• OTA commission levels
• Direct sales

It is a frantic time in the hospitality sector and in some respects it’s hard to figure out where to start for many hoteliers, but let’s focus on potentially the most disruptive and new of the quartet listed above.

Google Hotel Finder

A major development that will almost certainly impact the balance of the distribution world is the continued roll-out of Google Hotel Finder.

Google has developed its own metasearch tool as a counter move to Bing’s acquisition of Farecast, now called Bing Travel (remember that?).

In any case, Google recently started testing Google Hotel Finder ads above the regular Google Ads in search results.

Of course, this is inevitably causing mayhem and concern in the industry. In some respects, Google is effectively outmaneuvering metasearch sites such as HotelsCombined, Kayak and Trivago in one simple step.

Google Hotel Finder compares rates from major OTAs, which are paying a premium to show up feature in the service.

So, no, the OTA will not lose out on volume, but one could conclude that in the initial stages it will be a consolidation of volume to the larger OTAs, at least until Google has integrated more regional and local channels.

But what impact does this have on hotels? There are a few angles to consider here.

First of all, location has become even more important. Is your hotel situated within the preset parameters of your market according to Google Hotel Finder?

For New York, London and Paris the settings are quite all-encompassing, but in Amsterdam, Google Hotel Finder is curiously focused on the city center.

But what else should hotels consider when it comes to Google Hotel Finder? Reviews, is certainly one.

Over the last few years, Google has started collecting reviews from other websites to determine popularity and value of a hotel property.

Moreover, it has been collecting guest reviews also through Google Places (formerly known as Google Local Business Center). A mix of the reviews determines a hotel’s user rating, a tool by which consumers can also sort the hotels.

As suspected, reviews which are shown on the hotels page are only the ones from Google Places. For the other sites there is a smaller reference at the bottom of your hotel listing with the number of reviews.

Google does not even show a score for these other websites, which is something we admire from Trivago’s hotel listings.

Yes, hoteliers, Google is clearly on a mission to build the undisputed platform for hotel search. It will use the industry for as long as it needs to in order to get its own initiatives off the ground, but will then quietly move them into the background.

So in your efforts to gain traveler reviews and good guest scores, we now have to look beyond TripAdvisor, Oyster, Zoover, Vinivi,HolidayWatchdog, VirtualTourist, Yelp, etc.

Google Places and Google Hotel Finder have, almost overnight, gained huge significance in the area of hotel reviews.

Just imagine the impact on the demand and sales of  hotel when Google launches Hotel Finder into pole position for all hotel searches worldwide if a property is listed as #1 on the preset sort order, such as Hotel de Londres in San Sebastian.

Google will show not only OTAs, but also wholesalers, giving hoteliers a chance to secure reservations through less costly and preferred channels.

Properties will also have to press their representation companies to develop an interface with Google Hotel Finder, especially as it lists the hotel website URL.

See the example below of the Plaza Athenee Hotel in New York.

Of course, listing your website URL and phone number is currently free on Google Places, but we would not be surprised if Google introduced charges in the near future.

In any case it is very important to have the hotel account set up properly in Google Places – it will ensure a property appears in universal search results and Google Maps.

Metasearch and rate parity

Many hotels are trying to maintain a rate parity strategy on OTAs to level the playing field and create transparency for consumers.

However these efforts are being torpedoed by wholesalers publishing net rates at low mark-ups online.

We see wholesalers distributing package rates and net rates at low mark-ups directly and through affiliates that are listed on metasearch sites like Kayak, Trivago and HotelsCombined.

Here is a random date for a search in London on Trivago:

Hotels need to make sure they have their distribution well under control across all channels, online and offline.

Wholesalers are great channels, but hotels have to impose rules on the low net rates they offer and enforce them strictly, otherwise a strategy of rate parity might just be counter effective.

Increasing commissions/distribution costs

Another challenge hotels will be facing in 2012 is the increasing cost of distribution.

Quite a number of OTAs have raised their commissions from 12% to 15% in major destinations (which represents a 25% increase in cost, by the way), which will come straight from the bottom line of the hotel.

Many OTAs have also launched preferred programs for hotels to show up higher in the sort order of their own search results.

Commissions vary from 18% to 20%, and in some cases even 25%. Hotels have to be careful not to simply drive up costs while at the same time become reliant, or even dependent, on OTAs.

Keep in mind, their only mission is to grow in terms of global revenue, and that is not always in the best interests of a hotel.

We have seen some OTAs asking for high fixed allotments, another sign they are trying to penetrate hotels and the market as far as possible.

This happens when they can’t particularly grow any further geographically, but are pressed by shareholders for growth each year.

Frankly, unless we all start opening hotels on the moon in the next few years, the only way some agencies can grow is by getting a higher commission or control more of the inventory in a hotel.

So our advice is to be careful and develop alternative sales channels.

Direct sales

Nevertheless, we are seeing hotels becoming more aware each day of how they depend too much on OTAs, wholesalers and other third party distributors.

The rising cost of distribution and the advantages of direct sales is something hoteliers are starting to understand more profoundly. Therefore we foresee a shift or rather a re-shuffle in the distribution mix in hotels in 2012.

Hotels are willing to invest more in SEO, SEM, SMM and mobile marketing as a result of the increasing costs of distribution. There is a concerted effort to push direct sales, either through their own websites or call centers.

NB: Visit the Xotels blog for more tips and guidance, including a 2012 Marketing Plan for Hotels.

The travel industry is more diversified than ever before. So beware…

With nearly every travel booking site, or intermediary, providing one-stop shops for everything from airfare and room and board to transportation and tours, these sites aren’t only competing against each other.

They’re now competing against the suppliers themselves – airlines, hotels, rental car and tour companies.

Intermediaries are offering dynamic packages across suppliers, and competitive websites are investing in new features, such as online reviews, to keep travelers looking and booking on their site.

Meanwhile, suppliers are investing in their websites to capture more direct bookings, as well as investing in loyalty programs and other initiatives that help them reconnect with the customer.

And midst all this, consumers are taking advantage of their battle to please them.

Always on the prowl for the best deal, bargain hunters can make life in the travel industry difficult—especially for companies that can’t compete price-wise.

For them, brand loyalty is of particular importance. But how do you create and maintain brand loyalty when consumers have hundreds, if not thousands, of choices?

It’s all about user experience

By ensuring that visitors have a successful browsing and booking experience. Doing this requires speaking to individual customers’ needs by providing an optimized and personalized travel experience – across all digital touch-points.

In other words, if you please them, they will return.

Whether you’re a supplier or an intermediary, providing an optimized and personalized travel experience – across all digital touch-points – is critical to building and maintaining customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, many travelers today still encounter problems with the simplest of tasks on travel sites.

According to recent Forrester research, one in five leisure travelers encounter problems booking online. Fundamental tasks, such as completing, modifying or cancelling reservations, proved to be the most problematic for this group.

Start by asking yourself a few key questions:

• When a visitor comes to your site to plan a trip, are they able to effectively search for what they’re looking for?
• Do they abandon your site after the first set of trip results are displayed? Or do they get deep into the checkout process only to then bounce to do more research?
• Of those who do not complete the checkout process, can you identify any specific trends, such as getting stuck on a certain page or form before leaving?

A common problem in the online travel booking process is for a user to nearly complete the checkout process, only to bounce out of the funnel at the last minute to continue researching.

In this case, information that influences a traveler’s decision is likely being presented too late in the process, such as revealing hidden fees that result in a higher-than-quoted price.

What to do?

This is where multivariate testing can be used to determine which information should be presented up-front in the process – well before the visitor advances to the final stages of booking.

This type of testing can also determine whether presenting this information reduces overall conversion rates or has a negative impact on revenue.

Continuous A/B and Multivariate Testing (MVT) are key methods when it comes to optimizing websites and achieving specific behavioral results, such as converting browsers into buyers, reducing last-minute bounces, and so forth.

For example, by testing content and layout variations of the home page, search interface, and layout of search results, while also measuring the corresponding impact of each of those changes on engagement and bookings, you can determine which content and page layouts result more engaging experiences for site visitors, which ultimately leads to higher online revenue.

Testing with live visitors will provide the insight you need to determine why certain segments of visitors might abandon the process.

You also don’t want to ignore the fact that your website may need additional features to improve the customer experience.

For example, during the research phase, many travelers tend to consult Google Maps. Since maps can provide convenience to determine how close a hotel is to walk to a local attraction, or the types of restaurants available nearby – and are therefore helpful to someone planning travel – don’t force visitors to toggle between your site and Google.

Instead, try embedding a Google map directly into your site. This will keep visitors on your site and help them progress into the booking funnel.

Past traveler reviews are extremely influential on the decision to book. Knowing that online travel bookers rely on sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Lonely Planet for reviews and discussions, online travel bookers often consult these sites before pulling the “Book Now” trigger.

As with Google Maps, if your visitors are distracted by additional sites and pages, your abandon rate could suffer.

Try testing out integration of travel reviews from these reliable sources into the booking funnel to improve conversions.

By giving visitors information they are already looking for (the good, the bad and the ugly) you’re more likely to get—and keep—them as customers.

Conclusions

Of course, all of this is just the beginning. But in the end, it’s really about providing a seamless (and painless) online experience to help customers plan, book, and modify their trips.

Doing so will provide a deeper connection with consumers, as well as drive more online bookings, revenue, and customer loyalty.

NB: This is a guest article by Mark Simpson, president and founder of Maxymiser.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Once a consumer has searched for a hotel on a site, including Tripadvisor, Google Maps and Google Hotel Finder or Trivago, they can click on a ‘check rates’ button and be transferred to the hotel’s own website.

The FastBooking Direct Link has been developed using XML technology and delivers online consumers to a dedicated landing page within the hotel site.

The hotel e-commerce specialist estimates the Direct Link technology could put the hotel website and availability in front of more than 100 million unique visitors each month.

The technology will be extended to Kayak and Wego in the first quarter of 2012 with plans to extend it to additional partner sites during the course of next year.

Pickpocketmap shows the hotspots where tourists have had items stolen with details of when and where the incident took place.

The site was inspired by a tourist from the US who, after being robbed in Paris, was told that it happens every eight minutes.

Pickpocketmap relies on Twitter to find reports of theft and then extracts the location information to plot the incident on a map.

Tourists don’t need a twitter account to report an incident as a ‘new incident’ form is supplied on the home page of the website.

The service also provides a list of the top 10 cities with the most reported incidences of theft and allows tourists to find out more information.

The hope is that by using the service, travellers will become more vigilant.

For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as of this writing at 8 a.m. EST Aug. 25 says Hurricane Irene is “pounding the northwestern Bahamas.”

But, if you were a traveler or the family of vacationers in The Bahamas and you activated the new Google Maps weather functionality, you wouldn’t immediately know anything was amiss.

The only weather icons you see in The Bahamas are in Andros Town, admittedly a bit southeast of the hurricane, and Nassau, which is even further to the east.

Google’s weather information from The Weather Channel depicted the situation in Andros Town at 8:45 a.m. as 77 degrees (Fahrenheit) with thunderstorms.

You wouldn’t have any indication that a hurricane was wrapping up its work or threatening the area.

Only when you drill down a bit and click on the hourly forecast do you find out that there are squalls and winds of 75 mph.

It is difficult to find evidence of Hurricane Irene’s existence on the Google Maps in the Bahamas area even though a hurricane warning was still in effect for central and northwestern Bahamas.

Meanwhile, Irene is projected to make its way toward the East Coast of the U.S. and a hurricane warning was in effect from Surf City, North Carolina, to the North Carolina-Virginia border.

Google’s weather icon for Jacksonville, N.C., near the coast, shows it’s 75 degrees and partly cloudy. You need to click on the 10-day forecast to find out that “hurricane watches have been issued in the Carolinas. Irene is a large, powerful destructive storm.”

To get the weather feature going on Google Maps, you can hover over the map icon on the upper right corner of Google Maps and check off weather.

Suddenly, you see sun and cloud icons. Click on an icon and you’ll see temperatures for that destination from The Weather Channel and links to hourly and 10-day forecasts.

Alas, Google is a search company, but if you type in “Hurricane Irene” into the Google Maps search box, you are directed to Irene Circle in Hurricane, West Virginia.

Incidentally, the weather in Hurricane, West Virginia, currently is is 79 degrees and partly cloudy. You could find that out from the new weather feature on Google Maps.

Google unveiled the system at the end of July, a tool that enables users to edit shapes within an area of a city on a map to depict where they might want to stay, and delivers Google Places reviews and advertisements from online travel agencies to book the properties.

Hotel Finder is currently only a test for US users, but is likely to extend around the world in the same way the search giant’s hotel pricing on maps project did earlier this year.

As well as OTAs being asked to participate by giving Google a feed of hotel inventory, Google has picked Trust International to provide a data from its own database of properties.

Trust International is the first CRS to have been invited to participate, similar to when it was asked to do so for the Maps project in February this year, but once again the partnership is not exclusive and others are expected to be added in due course.

Managing director Richard Wiegmann says around 2,500 properties from its portfolio of 6,500 are being included in the pilot.

The Trust International feed contains content (including images, maps, descriptions), availability and rates for each property. Its prices will be shown alongside those provided by OTAs and the hotel chains also participating.

The Geo-Cosmos globe is currently swinging around at the Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, Japan.

Created by Japanese tech giant Mitsubishi Electric, Geo-Cosmos is a hefty six metres in diameter and includes over 10,000 Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs).

In its normal state the globe uses the OLEDs to beam live satellite images of the same spot from space. But controllers and visitors to the museum can also change the globe to feature weather patterns, images and other data collected from around the world, including a visual representation of wave patterns following the tsunami in Japan earlier this year.

Here is a clip:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwIvYwJXObc

In the meantime, however, step forward MIT graduate student in the institution’s digital signal processing group, Joseph McMichael.

When he isn’t “focused on compensating for quantization error in multi-channel interleaved systems” (!!), McMichael also plays around with Google Maps and code.

In his spare time he has created a wonderfully simple and rather fun tool called Globe Genie.

The idea is very simple: a user is placed somewhere on a Google Map with Streetview. They can then “teleport” themselves to a random location anywhere else in the world (although they can narrow it down to individual continents).

All the usual Streetview features are included, so the user can wander about as well whenever they get to a particular location.

Here is a starting point in the UK:

Good afternoon France:

Down to South Africa:

And, err, good evening Antarctica:

McMichael says:

“Globe Genie generates random latitude and longitude coordinates within several pre-specified rectangles around regions that have Street View imagery. It then queries Google’s servers to determine whether the point is valid. If not, it repeats this process until it finds a valid location.”

While Globe Genie is just a bit of fun, it is actually quite easy to see if the destinations served by a travel company with lots of products were put into a database that it could actually be rather nice “discovery” tool for potential customers on a website.

Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York this week, Google vice president of location and local services Marissa Meyer predicted a sea-change in how people use maps to locate local information.

Meyer says that by June this year the majority of searches being carried out on Google Maps will swing from desktop computers to mobile devices.

The current ratio is around 60% in favour of desktops, Meyer says, although this often switches at weekends when users are out of their offices or homes and doing activities that may require research on-the-road.

Meyer also claims 20% of all searches across Google are what the search giant calls “local” – ie queries around activities, things to do, destination services, amenities, etc.

The importance to the travel industry in the shift from desktop to mobile is not particularly related to the advertising or making sure hotels, activities and attractions are listed – many travel companies are engaged in this already.

What is does signify, however, is the influential position mobile is starting to have over the lives of consumers and how they use the web.

If consumers will be searching in increasing numbers from mobiles, they will no doubt be expecting suppliers of product and information to have mobile-friendly, easy-to-use websites so that when a search on a map sends the user off to a different site they have a good user experience.

Given the choice of two attractions, will the consumer opt for the one that provides relevant information in a mobile format, or the one that makes it difficult or almost impossible?

It’s an expectation thing…

Previously, one of the ways you could access the hotel ads and Book Now feature was from Google Place pages.

But now, as highlighted by the Understanding Google Maps & Local Search blog, Google is displaying hotel price ads with booking functionality within organic search results and seven-packs on initial search results pages.

Take a look at the online travel agency ads and Clift San Francisco Hotel ad in the following seven-pack, which appears after conducting a “San Francisco hotels” query and clicking on the $344 Clift San Francisco Hotel rate:

You can book the room on Priceline, Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Booking.com or the hotel website. Alternately, you can click on the Place page link to access thousands of user reviews, get hotel details, view the hotel on a Google Map, enter your travel dates and book the room on the aforementioned sites.

But, the display of hotel price ads, with their booking functionality, in initial search results pages takes the experimentation to new levels.

It’s like the ads are no longer in Chapter 2, but show up on the glossy book jacket.

And, then, when you conduct a Google search for “Los Angeles hotels,” you’ll see the hotel price ads with booking capabilities and Place page links to the right of organic search results on the initial search results page like this:

This puts hotel price ads and booking on Main Street — in front of millions of eyeballs — as Google searches for the most effective delivery formats.

For example, a Google search for “Chicago hotels” produces an organic result for Omni Chicago Hotel with an ad at the bottom which says, “15% Off Weekends.”

When you click on the ad, you find a Google Offer coupon for 15% off on a two-night weekend stay at the property, although Google does not guarantee the legitimacy of the third-party Offer.

Another wrinkle in Google hotel advertising is the Book Now feature on Place pages.

So, if you search for “Orlando hotels” and click on the Place link for the Sheraton Orlando Downtown Hotel, you can select dates for your stay, click on the $129 link and view ads from Priceline, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Expedia.com. There’s also a link to the hotel website.

And you can view the variations in pricing among the competitors — even among affiliated online travel agencies.

So, for example, Priceline offers a king bed at the property for a $129 base rate (or $145 including taxes and fees) while its sister company Booking.com displays a standard room at $139 per night (or $156 with taxes and fees).

Expedia and sister site Hotels.com offer traditional rooms at comparable rates to Booking.com’s while the hotel website’s rate for the room with the king bed is the same as Priceline’s.

Google’s Book Now ads show dynamic pricing as the user can change the dates and conduct various searches.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Land uncovered a variety of new Google Hotel Price Ad formats, including local 7-packs with pricing, ads in Google Places and “ads on a local inbox result for a single hotel.”

Google spokesman Jim Prosser emphasizes that ads for hotel prices don’t skew organic rankings for the properties in Google Maps or elsewhere in Google.

“This is an experiment,” Prosser says of the various ad formats. “We’re always experimenting with the look and feel of our search results pages, including the delivery of relevant advertising.”

Prosser says Google has nothing further to say about its plans for hotel advertising at this juncture.

Originally called WorldExplorer, BA is looking to overhaul the way visitors to the site search for flights, giving them the option to discover routes, destination and fares based on maps and personal requirements.

Users can search for fares and trip ideas based on price, country, date, temperature, class, journey time and carrier (BA only or code shares), but also by elements for which a destination is considered to be popular, such as beach, city break, ski, luxury, family, etc.

BA has spent the time since the beta launch of WorldExplorer (still available) in June 2010 by mainly refining the user experience and adding other tools such as search by temperature and handy country zoom buttons.

TripSeeker, as the system is now known, will sit within the main BA site and be available from the homepage and existing flight search channel.

The tool is similar in some ways to the Amadeus Affinity Shopper prototype created in late-2009, a system later adopted by fellow European carrier Lufthansa.

This is the original version of TripSeeker:

Google StreetView is a powerful tool that many people and travel companies use day to day to discover more about a location using on-street images and navigation.

Some of the travel businesses that have utilised StreetView in a powerful way include Expedia with its HotelView service and the Orbitz hotel path.

For the most part, Google’s unique formula seems to have a lack of true competition, but why is this?

Do other companies simply not offer the service, or is their service somehow buggier or less effective in what it tries to accomplish?

It’s a combination of many things, really. Microsoft offers a similar map service with their online search engine, Bing, which was generally considered by some critics to be a flop.

Microsoft has developed a similar “street view” application called Street Slide, which plans to accomplish many of the things Google’s version has, with “less clicking”.

Needless to say, critics aren’t as excited as the company. First impressions show us that the image quality of Street Slide may end up being a problem, as well as load times.

So how has Google essentially monopolized the market for this kind of software?

International competition

It would be rational to think that Google would have competitors in regards to StreetView and Google Maps.

While there are other services that provide maps, Google’s StreetView is unique in that it has to be done manually.

Google Maps is composed mainly of government-provided satellite images, while Google StreetView is a feature maintained by Google’s own team, who take all of the pictures from the roves of cars with optimized panoramic cameras or astride snowmobiles, bicycles, or other vehicles for areas that cars cannot readily access.

Google has had some issues with competition in foreign countries, such as in Austria. It wasn’t a matter of true market competition however.

Amid privacy concerns, the Austrian government banned Google StreetView from operating or providing images from their country, but critics believe it was an act of economic protectionism.

They say the Austrian government wanted to protect the domestic interests of NORC, a company that uses technology similar to Google’s own program to map Austrian cities and rural territories.

In China, the company City8 released a StreetView version of Beijing in 2006. This program was released a year earlier before Google, and Google’s battles with the People’s Republic of China have rendered many of their services useless in the country.

For this reason, City8 has been moderately successful, but only because of the PRC’s rigid censorship policies that condemned Google’s products as a “vehicle for revolution”.

Why no real competition?

Very few companies command the resources that Google does. Since Google can finance an expansive collection of new projects, they remain a literally unstoppable force on the technological front.

Smaller companies in both the United States and foreign nations do not have the means to nurture as effective a system as Google Maps or Google StreetView, so there are very few reasons for consumers to seek out alternatives.

Google was ahead of the game, and they jumped in on Google Maps long before competitors even began to think about expanding their horizons, utterly crushing MapQuest and other early threats.

The fact that Google’s Android OS is so seamlessly integrated with Google Maps and a built-in GPS makes the platform even more popular.

Since 27% of world smartphones are Android, Google Maps draws in even more potential users with a ready-made mobile platform. Google’s sophisticated navigation system is preferred by many users over the ever-popular TomTom and Garmin GPS systems.

Google’s adaptive, innovative GPS navigator utilizes frequently-updated traffic information so that the program can give the best suggestions for which routes to take on the go, and really strives to make the best use of 3G connectivity.

Because Google has created such a powerful system, true competition has yet to show itself.

NB: This is a guest article by Miles Walker, a freelance writer who normally writes feature articles for Carinsurancecomparison.org.

As various hotel technology providers begin to provide data to Google for its Google Hotel Price Ads program, some of the differences between Google’s approach and the methods of travel metasearch firms are beginning to emerge.

The Google Hotel Price Ad program enables OTAs and hotel websites to display room rates on Google Maps and then consumers can click through to the respective websites for booking. It would look something like the following image, although the InterContinental Buckhead Atlanta listing would show a room rate and not just display “owner site.”

Both Google and the metasearch companies undoubtedly would cache hotel pricing data to various degrees.

But, one key difference is that Google places a higher priority on storing hotel pricing data locally while metasearch players are seemingly more likely to poll hotel CRS systems for pricing and availability changes.

“We’re able to deliver lightning-fast results by storing a copy of the price for each covered hotel result locally on our servers,” says Jim Prosser, a Google spokesman. “We maintain our high level of data accuracy by frequently updating the prices, and many of our partners push notifications when any of their pricing changes.”

But, while Kayak or other metasearch players would be more likely to do a live search for hotel pricing and availability, industry experts say, Google tends to want all of the pricing and availability data on its servers — which could sometimes to lead to out-of-date pricing and sold-out rooms.

“With Google it’s all about speed and returning information quickly,” says one source familiar with Google’s requirements.

Or, as Rick Seaney, the cofounder and CEO of flight-metasearch engine FareCompare puts it,  ”Google’s model has always been, get ‘em on, get ‘em off.”

And, if Google decided to poll hotels for pricing and availability, then “Google Instant would turn into Google forever,” Seaney says.

It is believed that Google requires participating hotels to provide Google Maps with the lowest publicly available rates, for stays of one to seven nights, double occupancy, with arrival days up to 90 days ahead.

But, Kayak, for instance, enables consumers to make more complex hotel queries than double occupancy. For example, you can search Kayak for two rooms at once and for up to eight people.

“If you have more than two people, then you aren’t getting as accurate a result [with Google Maps hotels] as you might with Kayak looking for four people staying in the room,” says RockCheetah’s Robert Cole, a hospitality consultant.

“Google will certainly get clicks for hotels instead of customers going to intermediaries,” Cole says, adding, however, that conversion rates may be “a totally different dynamic.”

All agree that speed versus accuracy on hotel rates and availability is a tradeoff.

As Seaney points out, being a general search engine, where speed is paramount, is a whole different ballgame than dabbling in verticals like travel, where consumer frustration with unbookable hotel rooms and rates could tarnish your brand.

Google’s proposed acquisition of ITA Software for airfare search and the Google Maps hotel metasearch beta has sparked alarm among some in the travel industry given Google’s status as the dominant search engine and the traffic it commands.

But, might travel metasearch companies such as Kayak have some advantages because of their greater familiarity with the travel industry and seeming ability to deliver results — perhaps not as “lightning-fast” as Google’s — but perhaps more accurately?

Seaney, for one, says he’s not yet convinced that Google can win in travel, and of course, that remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, in other developments, Trust International, a global CRS provider which is working with Google to get hotel pricing into Google Maps and related Google Places pages, says it signed Rotana, a hotel management company in the Middle East and Africa, to a contract for the Google program.

Rotana is the first hotel management company in the Middle East and Africa that Trust has signed up for the Google program.

“The contract, signed today [March 9], at this year’s ITB conference in Berlin, will allow Rotana to display their real-time rates and availability in relevant search listings on Google Maps and on related Google Places pages as a pay-per-click advertising module connected with the Rotana booking engine, which is power by Trust International,” Trust states.

Pegasus states: “The new Google Hotel Price Ads program is a great way for hotels to capture direct bookings on their web sites. In a way, Google has incorporated hotel metasearch functionality into their core search processes by allowing entry of arrival and departure dates and deep linking to an OTA or hotel web site. Hotels need to be participating so that consumers have a choice of booking through an OTA or direct with the hotel.

“Pegasus is just announcing a similar product called MetaSearch Services (MSS) that enables hotels to participate in this manner with traditional metasearch sites, such as Kayak and others. Early results have shown as much as a 5:1 return on investment from pilot customers.”

The original post follows:

Google is continuing its drive to get hotel-direct pricing into Google Maps and is working with Pegasus Solutions to up the ante.

Pegasus provides hotel distribution services to more than 86,000 properties and its data would enable Google to display room pricing from hotel websites, along with already-presented hotel pricing from online travel agencies, in Google Maps, according to Travel Weekly (US).

Currently, hotel displays alongside Google Maps indicate the hotel pricing from OTAs, but although hotel website links are displayed, too, there usually is no room price listed.

As reported several weeks ago, hotel CRS provider Trust International also is working with Google to get hotel pricing into Google Maps and Google Places.

Travel Weekly also reports that Pegasus expects to soon announce a metasearch solution for hotel pricing, as well.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

• Brad Gerstner – founder and chairman. My day job is running a hedge fund called Altimeter Capital in Boston, but I’ve been in and around online travel as an investor and entrepreneur for more than ten years. Previously, I was co-CEO at National Leisure Group. Currently, I am on the board of Orbitz and other travel startups like Off & Away and Nor 1.
• Kevin Fliess – general manager and VP of product. Kevin runs the business day-to-day. He is also founder and former-CEO of TravelMuse, which was sold to Travel Ad Network late last year.
• Calvin Yang – VP of engineering. Calvin is the mastermind behind our proprietary technology. He was previously at Google and designed the company’s image search platform. After that he founded OpTrip, which is company that merged with Room 77 and still operates as a separate brand.
• Melissa Beauchamp – VP of partner relations. Melissa is leading the charge of building relationships with hotels. She joined us from Hotwire, where she ran supplier relations.
• Jason Bushman – VP of business development. Jason was previously with Orbitz and National Leisure Group.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

I provided initial seed round and opened it up to angels and institutional investors. These are recognizable folks, including Rich Barton (founder of Expedia and Zillow), Erik Blachford (former president and CEO of IAC Travel), Bob Pittman (founder of MTV), and Hugh Crean (former president and CEO of Farecast), among others.

Other investors include Par Capital Management, an early investor in ITA, Farecast, and Orbitz; Sutter Hill Ventures, which also invested in Farecast; and Felicis Ventures among others.

What problem are you trying to solve?

We are trying to give consumers more transparency and control around hotel rooms. There are a number of sites where you can find details and review about hotels and see images for “category” types, but when it comes to hotel room data it’s like a big locked box.

I have been personally peeved about this for years and finally assembled a team who could do something about it.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Room 77 has built the first hotel room database and search engine that can be accessed via the Web and mobile devices. As our core, we’re set on indexing every room in properties around the globe 3-star and above. We’ve already indexed about 425,000 rooms at 2,500 properties and we estimate there are about 5 million rooms in about 25,000 properties.

Our team has built some amazing tech and products: first our Room Rank technology ranks rooms in a hotel based on a traveler’s preferences and shows this by a percentage and color code. For example, a room that matches you preferences will be shown in green as a “strong match” at percentages above 70%.

One of the “wow” factors is our patent-pending virtual Room View, which simulates the actual room view from each room using an algorithm our engineering team designed using Google Earth and factoring in every room’s latitude, longitude and altitude.  Based on our regression testing, this is remarkably accurate.

Our mobile app is a check-in lifesaver. Simply enter the room number offered by the front desk clerk and Room 77 will alert you whether you should “take it” or “leave it” based on how well it matches your individual preferences.

The app also makes it extremely easy to share data and feedback with Room 77 by just a few taps to rate the room and upload interior photos – or even the floor plan, located on the back of the guestroom door. We hope every traveler with an iPhone downloads it and sends feedback.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

While Room 77 has appeal for any traveler who stays in a hotel, we are focused on power business and leisure travelers who are comfortable who book online and are comfortable with the latest Web and mobile technologies.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

While we did alpha and beta testing, it wasn’t a hard sell because every one of our investors is a frequent traveler and sees the benefit of Room 77 and the long-term opportunity.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Our core service and data is free to consumers as is the mobile app.  While we are most focused now on improving the user experience and growing our database, we see numerous monetization opportunities down the line.  We will be exploring some of these in the months ahead and we lump into two primary buckets – advertising and transactional revenue sharing.

On advertising, we’ll likely test display and contextual advertising initially; and, we expect to pilot things like Room Request Guarantee in which consumers might pay a fee to guarantee a specific room, much like they do today for premium airline seats.  We’d expect to share in that revenue with the hotel partner.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We’re the world’s first and only hotel room search engine. We offer patent-pending Room Rank and Room View technology to help travelers gain more insight and control over every hotel stay.

Weaknesses:

• We currently have data on roughly 10 percent of what we’ve identified as the market opportunity, but we intend to close the gap quickly and add more markets.

Opportunities:

• The two big opportunities we’re exploiting now is power of the crowd in helping us “sleuth” data and working with hotels to validate their data.  The combination of the two will help us accelerate data collection and get us closer to having a complete database of all 3-star and above hotels and resorts around the world.  There are numerous opportunities we see down the line as we start to more closely integrate Room 77 into hotel booking and management systems.

Threats:

• The biggest threat we originally identified was hotel resistance and we’ve already overcome that.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

There really haven’t been naysayers among those who have seen the full product demo.  Initially, I heard some skepticism about whether hotels would work with us, but we’ve had great response from most of the hotels and chains we’ve spoken with. In fact, since we launched on Thursday, we’ve been contacted by properties around the globe wanting to get their property “verified.”

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Right now, we’re all about expanding our database and continuing to improve the customer experience.  We have a number of metrics and new product features on the horizon we’ll be tracking internally.

What I can share: in 12 months we expect to have data on more than one million rooms and be in more than twice the markets we’re in today, offering significantly more functionality on multiple mobile platforms.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.