Marriott International doesn’t take kindly to Google, Yahoo and Bing selling the hoteliers trademarks as keywords to competitors and expects the search engines to change their practices.

Shafiq Khan, Marriott’s senior vice president e-commerce, says Marriott is “very concerned” about search engines selling Marriott keywords to others.

Speaking on a panel, “Hotel Executive Discussion,” at the TravelCom conference in Dallas, Khan said the practice “is a very significant issue. It is going to catch up with Google, with Yahoo with Bing.”

A Google search today for Renaissance Hotels & Resorts, a Marriott brand, turned up Expedia and Travelocity sponsored links, among others, with the word “hotels” in the text.

A Bing search today for Renaissance Hotels & Resorts produced sponsored ads from Expedia and Travelocity which were displayed higher than the Renaissance Hotels sponsored ad, like this:

And, a Yahoo search today for Renaissance Hotels & Resorts turned up an ad from Reserve Discount Hotels as the first sponsored result, like this:

Khan says Marriott is engaged in discussions with Google about its trademark-keyword practices and “we’ll be managing that with Google.”

He adds that expects Google will be a “smart company, a wise company” and will alter its practices.

The trademark issue has been a thorny one for years.

Carnival Cruise Lines recently banned its travel agency partners from using its trademarks as keywords in search engines.

Other companies have sued the search engines and otherwise pressured them to curb their practices.

In other matters, Khan says 2010 is “shaping up as a very good year,” although he adds, “I don’t think we will see 2007 again for quite some time.”

Dennis Woodside of Google has some simple advice for travel marketers who will have to try to cope with the coming disruption — “dog-fooding.”

In his keynote address at TravelCom in Dallas, Woodside, Google’s vice president of American operations, says travel companies will have to eat their own dog feed — i.e. constantly test and tweak the solutions they’ve created — as they meet head-on looming disruptions in search, video, mobile and cloud computing.

Search: Woodside says search will have to become richer, more social and global as consumers seek user-generated content and video about their travel experiences.

“The way you think of search has to evolve,” Woodside says.

Video: Woodside says video will evolve into a more flexible advertising mode as half of all video will be addressable to certain consumers or segments instead of the current 30-second spot with a one-size fits all approach.

For example, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority would be able to make inroads by advertising on the Web certain racy shows or attractions out in the desert in a more cost-effective way than is done today, he says.

Travel marketers would be able to reach much larger audiences with video at various price points than is the current norm today, Woodside says.

Mobile: In the long term, some 30% of online bookings will come from mobile devices, Woodside says.

In fact, he argues, “we think it [mobile] will become more important than the PC.”

Even Google feels a threat from mobile, Woodside says, and it will have to adapt all of its services for mobile or become “less relevant.”

Cloud computing: Most travel marketers will have to migrate their services to cloud computing, which will be another disruptive force, Woodside says.

So, hold onto your hats, break out your smartphone and pass the dog food.

Google’s Dennis Woodside says the company rolled out Google Buzz too abruptly and likely won’t  introduce other new products in a similar manner.

Woodside, Google’s vice president of American operations, says Google also shouldn’t have linked Buzz to people’s Gmail contacts because e-mail contacts aren’t necessarily part of people’s social networks.

Google employees used Buzz internally before its release and didn’t pick up some of these issues, he says.

“That’s the cost, to some degree, of innovation,” says Woodside, referring to missteps with Buzz.

Woodside was answering questions today after delivering a keynote address at the TravelCom conference in Dallas.

Woodside also addressed Google’s motivations for running its first Super Bowl ad, the Parisian Love video.

He says much of the buzz these days surrounding Google has little to do with its core search functionality so Google’s goal with the  ad was to reach a large TV audience at the Super Bowl and reconnect with consumers’ passion for search.

Woodside also lent his support for Google’s initiatives in behavioral advertising and believes that the advertising industry is moving in the right direction.

Google’s policy is to be transparent about behavioral advertising and give consumers tools to opt out of targeted advertising, if that is what they desire, he says.

In that regard, Google has a Google Ads Preferences manager, which is geared to inform consumers about which interests Google associates with them, and it also gives the consumers the power to add or delete interests.

[I just looked up my Google Ad Preferences and it says: "No interest categories are associated with your ads preferences so far." Woops, I guess I'm fairly uninteresting.]

Woodside says the reason few people click on display ads is that targetting is not as advanced as it is with search ads, and that behavioral advertising will improve results for display-ad publishers.

And, what’s in store for e-readers like the Kindle or possibly the iPad?

Arguing that Amazon’s Kindle is a closed system, Woodside believes open systems will eventually prevail and that particular devices will become less important.

Woodside believes eventually most e-books will be accessible over the Web through browsers.

Says Woodside: “On the Web, open systems seem to win in the long run.”

In a move likely to reignite the ongoing debate about Google’s influence over the travel industry, engineers have the sector back on their radars as they launch another AdWords Comparison Ads trial.

The extension of the Google Comparison Ads pilot to the UK announced yesterday will see a new vertical tested by the search giant: credit cards.

Comparison Ads is effectively a metasearch (or price comparison, using the Cheapflights parlance) of products already in the AdWords system.

It looks and feels like a scaled-down Kayak in terms of functionality.

Trialled for the first time in some selected states in the US with mortgages in October 2009, credit card firms will be the next sector taken on board to test pricing, interest from suppliers, functionality and user behaviour.

Google is inevitably and officially remaining tight-lipped as to how, where and when it might extend the project further.

Even back in December 2009, representatives were playing down any idea that Comparison Ads would be extended.

Fast forward two months and unofficially from within the mothership travel is now acknowledged as an obvious sector to consider for a trial given the quantity of ads in the system, size of the marketplace and the engine’s starting point for many travel consumers.

As noted previously, Comparison Ads as a concept throws up a multitude of issues for Google and advertisers alike:

• PPC ad copywriting
• Product feeds
• Google client servicing
• Product sourcing
• Feed reliability
• Placement within Google real estate
• AdSense extension

Google surprised many in adland a few months ago when its first ever major outdoor advertising campaign was launched simply to plug its Chrome browser.

Since then, posters espousing the benefits of downloading the Chrome web browser have appeared all over the London Tube network and in other high profile outdoor advertising spots.

Google is trying to woo readers by showing off how many activities a user can carry out at any one time – watch videos, emails, tweet, etc.

Only two brand names are mentioned: one belongs to sister company and video sharing beast YouTube and, curiously, lastminute.com.

“4 airline tickets booked on lastminute.com.”

There are some companies that would pay vast quantities of money to secure such a ringing endorsement from the likes of Google.

Google will not comment on any financial arrangements surrounding the advertising, but it turns that Lastminute.com did not pay for being including in such a high profile position.

Fresh from being cited by Google as a key competitor, Kayak is rolling out its trip planning tool to the UK market this week and also unveiling a major upgrade to its iPhone app.

The Kayak Trips feature launched in the US in October 2009 and was seen by some as a contender to the itinerary management market currently spearheaded by the likes of TripIt and Traxo.

The UK version includes all of the existing trip planning features launched last year such as flight details, hotel bookings and activities into a trip itinerary.

Central to the service is a tool (similar to the TripIt system) which allows users to email their booking confirmations to Kayak for automatic inclusion in the system.

Executive vice president for corporate development, Keith Melnick, now also looking after European operations following the exit of managing director Faisal Galaria last year, reckons visits to Kayak from Europeans doubled in January.

Later this week will also see an upgrade to Kayak’s iPhone app. The new version will include enhanced search tools and flight tracking, email sharing and hotel photos as well as a baggage fees function to display prices of luggage costs on every airline.

No word as yet when the booking tool will be launched.

Some folk in Connecticut, US, will be scratching their heads as feverishly as they are digging their way through the snow this weekend after Google named the metasearch firm Kayak on its list of competitors.

The Norwalk, CT-based company was named in Google’s 2009 Annual Report – filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 12 2010 – alongside the likes of Monster, eBay and Amazon.

This is the first time that Google has named vertical search companies as competitors, normally only reserving such flattery for software and search companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo.

The Annual Report says:

“Our business is characterized by rapid change and converging, as well as new and disruptive, technologies. We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising.”

It then goes on to list:

• Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
• Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their websites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.
• Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter.

Further on in the report, Google says competition will have a long-lasting effect.

“We believe our revenue growth rate will generally decline as a result of a number of factors including increasing competition, the inevitable decline in growth rates as our revenues increase to higher levels, and the increasing maturity of the online advertising market.”

When asked about being cited as a competitor, Kayak chief marketing officer Robert Birge says the company has a “great relationship” with Google as an advertising medium, but adds humbly:

“I’m a bit surprised that we would be called out given our size (I’m pretty sure that Google has a bigger janitorial staff in their NY offices than our 97 employees) and given that using the much larger OTAs are also a substitute behavior for using a search engine.”

Tnooz posted the following question on Twitter:

“Imagine you were cited as a competitor by Google. Would you be a) flattered b) terrified c) start prepping those sale documents?”

One public response from Sunshine.co.uk boss Chris Clarkson and a handful via DM said simply: all of the above.

All of the excitement leading up to tonight’s Super Bowl has little to do with the gridiron and much to do with the advertisements.

That’s true, at least for some marketers.

Thus, John Battelle’s Searchblog reports that Google will break longstanding tradition and run a TV advertisement during tonight’s Super Bowl.

Battelle says this Parisian Love ad, which outlines how to “impress a French girl” through Google search, will be aired during the Indianapolis Colts-New Orleans Saints clash tonight, probably during the third quarter.

Battelle points out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt got the buzz going with this tweet yesterday: “Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)”

Hmmm. If Google’s advertisers follow Schmidt’s apparent lead, then perhaps they should set aside less money this year for text ads on Google, and consider putting a little more into harder-to-measure TV spots.

Microsoft, of course, has shelled out a lot of money since the Summer on Bing for TV and radio ads, and picked up a little market share.

Maybe Google wants to play a little smash-mouth football with little Bing.

As reported, Homeaway, the vacation-rental company,  appears to be the only travel dot-com with an ad in today’s Super Bowl, and it, too, is slated to run in the third quarter.

Here’s HomeAway’s Super Bowl ad. It was available several hours before the game.

For the record, Kayak, which has been running its “search one and done” ads during NFL games and elsewhere, says it won’t be running these ads during today’s Super Bowl.

At $2.6 million for a 30-second ad, who can blame them?

Company-employee disputes are not like they used to be – if the latest spat between British Airways and a union representing cabin crews are anything to go by.

The long-running face-off between BA and Unite has gone from being ugly to downright vitriolic as Twitter accounts are launched to spread their message through social media.

Unite has already created a video for YouTube outlining its position against the company, but the use of Twitter marks an new approach and is aimed at building support from the flying public.

The airline is battling cabin crew over changes to working conditions, pay and job cuts, but its ill-fated and hugely unpopular strike action planned for the Christmas period in 2009 is widely believed to have damaged its campaign.

A Twitter account [@amicuscabincrew] launched late last year charted events and procedures for members leading up to the first strike ballot and into 2009.

The second account, under the name @unitebaupdates is far more opinion-led and tracks mentions in the mainstream media as well as using services such as Twitpic to poke fun at BA.

Neither account has thousands of followers but posts are presumably being created to appear in live search results within Google and Bing and on Twitter Search for British Airways/BA.

This week the union balloted members over strike plans for March 2009 after promising not to disrupt the Easter Holiday period.

User review giant TripAdvisor will have a few worries on its mind if Google follows through on its threat to pull out of China following a row over cyber attacks on government protestors.

Tnooz has learned the TripAdvisor-DaoDao business in China currently gets around a third of all its search engine traffic just from Google.

Google has threatened to reverse its previous decision to block sites and information banned by the Chinese government, a move which effectively could lead Google.cn being blocked at the touch of a button.

TripAdvisor general manager in China, Hao Wu, says the company is watching developments closely but has no sense at this stage which way the row is likely to go.

The Expedia-owned business was always going to be one of the big travel sites under threat as it relies to heavily on and performs well in natural search through Google.

Wu says:

“If Google is able to redirect Google.cn users and advertisers to Google.com and Google.com’s access is not noticeably impacted, then the immediate impact to our biz would be minimal.

“In the long term, if Google completely retreats from China, then it’d be worrisome for us in China since our SEM cost will likely go up as Baidu dominates the market.”

Another “key component”, Wu explains, is TripAdvisor’s use of Google Maps across much of the hotel pages on the site .

TripAdvisor officially launched DaoDao (Chinese variation of the brand) in April 2009 following a six-month beta test in the country.

The division has grown far quicker than other TripAdvisor country brands  around the world (around 50 employees) due to the complex nature of the business and protocols.

Wu says there are a number of options in the long term, including using over search players such Sohu and Ten Cent QQ, but both sites are too small to challenge Baidu, the country’s biggest search engine.

Tim Russell, UK & Ireland managing director of travel technology and GDS supplier Amadeus, says his company is most similar to Microsoft than the arguably more glamorous Apple or Google.

Tnooz thought it would be interesting to found out how the boss of a travel tech firm with two major competitors would compare his company to that trio of IT giants, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

After much stroking of the chin, Russell went for the stalwart of software and dominating presence on desktop operating systems.

Russell, who joined the UK & Ireland team in 2009 after nearly ten years with the company in Australia, says in Amadeus’s early days the fledgling GDS would “definitely have been Google as we were the upstart in the marketplace”.

It probably depends country-by-country but Amadeus is well established in the UK and Europe now, Russell says.

So with Amadeus sidling up with Microsoft it then leaves Sabre and Travelport to fight over who positions themselves with either Google or Apple.

Some might argue that this is where the comparisons should end given that the GDSs have a famously Jurassic reputation (Microsoft anyone?) and any of the trio that likens themselves to Google or Apple is possibly a few clicks short of a viewdata screen.

But despite the enduring image of the GDSs within the travel tech community, new research illustrates the power that the GDSs still hold over much of the industry.

A PhoCusWright report commissioned by Interactive Travel Services Association paints a pretty rosy picture in terms of income generated by the GDSs.

• GDS companies powered more than US$268 billion in worldwide travel revenue in 2008 through 1.1 billion transactions – or more than 2,100 transactions per minute.
• Travel revenue powered by GDSs in the US rose from US$93.6 billion in 2006 to US$98.2 billion in 2007 and US$98.7 billion in 2008, despite the recession.
• GDSs also account for a significant portion of all European travel revenue, with 21% of all revenue and 47% of airline bookings in 2008.
• GDS companies power the reservations and technology infrastructure for more than 163,000 travel agency locations and nearly half a million travel agents worldwide.
• The GDSs provide access to more than 550 airlines, 90,000 hotel properties, 30,000 car rental locations, and hundreds of major tour operators and cruise lines.
• The three major GDS companies, Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport, had combined corporate revenue of US$9.624 billion in 2008 and employ more  than 23,000 people.

Jay Campbell of The Beat remarks darkly that the report is more of a primer ahead of the much-rumoured IPOs all three are believed to be considering.

Indeed the publication of such a glowing report is remarkably well-timed and will no doubt help woo potential investors pondering how big the marketplace really is.

The report still leaves many questions unanswered.

• Is the GDS sector growing by virtue of better (more profitable) relationships with airlines, hotels and intermediaries?
• Is the new or substantial growth going to come only from developing technology away from the core GDS business (reservation or connect systems)?
• Is “full-content” ever going to be REAL full-content when it comes airlines and ancillary services?

Some in the sector believe that even some of the most vociferously anti of the airlines in the industry (such as Ryanair) will eventually come to the fold, seeing the GDS as a value proposition for product distribution rather than an irksome old and annoying relative.

If they do then the GDS sector will have more than a rosy future – and, if the trio throw even more of their revenues back into R&D, they may even be brave enough to liken themselves to the much envied Googles and trendy Apples of the world.

Well, the threat by Google that it may cease operations in China has certainly set tongues wagging in the east.

Google announced that it would cease censoring results of its Google.cn search engine, after what it says was a series of hacking attacks aimed at human rights activists.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web, have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” wrote David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google.

Could this really mean the end of Google in China? And what does it all mean for the rest of Asia? And, in particular, what does it mean for travel?

To get a feel for what travel experts on the mainland think of the development, I made a few calls to contacts this evening.

One had just returned from dinner where the hot topic of the evening was – you guessed it – Google and its future in China.

Says my contact who’s been working in the online travel space for several years: “By coincidence, China’s No.1 search engine Baidu was hijacked by the Iran hacker yesterday morning of local time. Historically Baidu has been very popular among young Chinese citizens while many middle-class professionals still prefer to use Google as the prime search engine when they conduct job-related research or plan their vacations, whether for domestic or overseas travel.”

Google’s departure, he says, would have significant impact on some industry segments in China, like the already weakened export industries, who are increasingly relying on Google for overseas marketing.

“The impact will also be felt by major international OTAs and tourist destinations who are heavily relying on using SEO or paid key word search to market to Chinese consumers.

“For example, when you search ‘Book London hotel’ in Chinese through Google, Booking.com, Agoda and HRS.cn are among the top five natural search results. When you search for ‘Book Singapore hotels’ in Chinese, Agoda and HRS.cn are also among the top 5. With Google’s absence, the international companies need to learn how to play with Baidu’s rules which is more like a business listing service.”

However sources say since the announcement, Google seems to have softened its stand.

One source says: “When I searched for pictures by using the key word of Tiananmen square in English around 3pm this afternoon, it generated a lot of uncensored pictures. But by 10pm, all these sensitive pics had been filtered.”

“Personally I do not believe Google will pull out from China market which is too attractive for any international companies to ignore.

“But this fact reminds us that to succeed in China, multinational companies need to be very flexible with their marketing strategies and too much reliance on one marketing tool will put them in big risk. Twitter is blocked, Facebook is blocked and the same fate for Youtube and blogspot. Who will be the next?

“Without Google, the Chinese will still have a happy life. But it will stop the internet revolution in China.”

Another source said he seriously doubts if Google will pull out. “Their sales team has been scrambling all day to reassure clients and publishers this is not happening.”

He said that in travel advertising, Google was a small player – 5% – behind Qunar (25% share) and Baidu (15-20% share).

“The last time a company threatened the Chinese government and won was Jardine Matheson around 1840. I’m not sure it will happen again.”

News that Google is considering pulling out of the fastest growing consumer market on the planet would leave the Chinese domestic internet with one powerful search engine for travel products.

The search giant says it will be forced to change its current strategy in China if a series of so-called cyber attacks continue on the GMail accounts of domestic human rights activists and those outside of the country sympathetic to their cause.

Alongside the wider economic and diplomatic implications of such high level shenanigans (US secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already waded into the row) is the impact on the burgeoning travel scene in China.

Google damaged its holier than thou (”Do No Evil”) image when it entered China under what many considered to be highly controversial terms in 2006 – limiting access to natural search results for topics such as the Falun Gong organisation and events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Officials now say that if the cyber attacks continue or go unexplained then it will be forced to remove the Chinese government-requested ban on controversial subjects – a move which would no doubt anger the host and effectively see it blocked from the web.

According to the BBC, Google stood to make around $600 million from its Chinese operations in 2010 – a sizeable figure but one it is clearly willing to risk.

Google currently shares search duties – but is not as big – with local engine Baidu.

What Google does provide is organic (albeit, somewhat restricted depending on the topic) listings as well as paid keyword – as opposed to Baidu which is a paid-for only service akin to a classified listings service.

Removing Google from the Chinese market would leave  travellers with one dominant player in general search (no irony lost there for those in the west who have seen Google rise to the top), CTrip for bookings and Qunar for metasearch – all of which are locally owned.

PhoCusWright general manager for Asia, Ram Badrinathan, says: “Baidu will have no competitor in the market and whatever little access to free information Google provided will come to an end.”

Where an exit for Google from China gets very interesting for travel is in the area of natural search that Google provides.

TripAdvisor, for example, relies heavily on its fantastic performance in organic search results for hotels to drive traffic to its site. What would be the impact on its Chinese site (and DaoDao) if Google disappeared from the market and it was forced to buy listings and keywords on Baidu?

The review specialist isn’t alone in this area. Mothership Expedia has also bought heavily into the Chinese market through eLong and Kuxun, both of which presumably are well optimised and also feature highly in natural search results.

A decision by Google to pull out of China (no doubt hugely influenced by what happens at a diplomatic level, now the US administration is involved) is far from a foregone conclusion at this stage.

Indeed, Chinese authorities may in practice attempt to meet the Mountain View, California-based Google metaphorically somewhere in the middle.

Google’s decision to enter China in the first place was full of compromise, so travel firms investing in China and the domestic market will watch with interest as one of the most high profile companies in the world wrestles with the government of the fastest growing economy in the world.

The result of a defamation case in Paris, France, has shed light on the lengths companies will go to if search engines are providing users with incorrect or damaging information.

The case, involving the Centre National Privé de Formation a Distance (CNFDI) and Google, centres on the search giant’s automatic drop-down on its homepage query box.

The system attempts to predict what a user is looking for and puts forward suggestions and the number of results available.

Queries for CNFDI were found to have results returned based on the word “scam” – something the organisation obviously didn’t like.

The Paris court of appeal has swung in favour of CNFDI and ordered Google to remove the suggestion from search results.

For its part Google says the system is automatic, based on the complex algorithmic Kung Fu going behind the scenes, and denies liability.

So given the emotive nature of travel, a product which often triggers consumers to rant in forums and on blogs following unfortunate events on holidays, are travel companies falling foul of the Google Suggest tool?

Tnooz tested all the travel organisations featured in the First Tweet from 50 Travel Companies and it appears that most companies would be pretty pleased with what Google Suggest is throwing back at users.

The only three to find themselves on the receiving end of slightly unsavoury suggestions on Google UK were American Airlines (crash), Air France (crash) and British Airways (strikes) - even Ryanair, with its less than savoury reputation in the media and supposedly among consumers, escaped in a test of other companies.

Meanwhile, perhaps EasyJet will be wondering why this rather unusual equine addition to the suggestions returned from Google US…

One month does not a search engine make.

But it’s clear from the comScore’s U.S. search rankings in November that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is making market share gains, and Yahoo’s share of queries are falling.

Google’s queries, meanwhile, continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace.

The question arises, then, whether the pending Bing-Yahoo search partnership finds Bing throwing in its lot with a partner in decline or whether Yahoo can turn things around.

And, is Bing picking up most of its market share from new-partner Yahoo instead of big-time target Google? [The Ask Network and AOL showed market share dips of 10 basis points each in November, as well.]

In November 2009, Google’s market share in search hit a record high of 65.6%, and that amounted to growth of 20 basis points versus October 2009, comScore shows.

Microsoft websites, including Bing, in November continued their steady growth since the Bing launch half a year ago and took a 10.3% market share, an increase of 40 basis points since October 2009. That’s faster than Google is growing, but Bing has a lot longer way to go.

And, Yahoo! websites’ search market share in the U.S. fell 50 basis points to a 17.5% market share in November, according to comScore.

“Bing clearly is showing still-early but significant market share gains,” says Citi’s Mark Mahaney in a research note. “Yahoo is clearly experiencing a material share loss in one of its two core businesses. This puts greater pressure on the company to demonstrate a credible growth strategy with its display advertising segment.”

Mahaney points to Google’s market share gains as “incrementally positive,” although he cautions that Google faces “very significant competition from Internet-related companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft.”

Since the Bing launch, and with a ton of marketing dollars behind it, Microsoft’s search market share has grown from 8.4% to 10.3%.

Things are starting to get interesting — but this is only the beginning of the beginning.