Google Hotel Finder: more transparency please

IN-DEPTH: Hotel companies have high expectations from Google Hotel Finder for driving online traffic and revenue. EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta assesses how the tool is faring

Hotel companies count on Google’s offerings, including Google Hotel Finder, to drive direct business to their websites.

One of the options most keenly evaluated is Google Hotel Finder. It stands out for the ease of use and lets travellers book through OTAs or directly through the hotel’s website.

For hotels that are able to source demand directly from Google Hotel Finder, it is a big advantage as they will have a relationship with the end consumer. However, the acquisition cost of sourcing direct demand is key and at the very least should not be higher than the distribution cost associated with OTAs or wholesale distribution companies.

Distribution and demand

Kurien Jacob, senior vice president - revenue and distribution, Highgate Hotels says Google Hotel Finder still has a long way to go to be an important demand source. 

“However, since they’re part of Google, we can definitely predict that it will be an important option in the future for driving demand,” he says. “In its current form Google Hotel Finder is very similar to Kayak and so it has not yet dramatically changed the distribution landscape.”

According to Aloke Bajpai, CEO and Co-Founder iXiGO.com, the extent to which hotels will benefit commercially from Google Hotel Finder will depend on a multitude of factors. Hotels need to consider the following:

•   How would CPC rates on Hotel Finder compare to Google Adwords keywords and how different are the click-to-book ratios?

•   How competitive the bidding on Hotel Finder eventually become. Considering that it’s a click one step down the funnel, the competition is likely to be more intense.

•   Whether there are ‘Quality Scores’ introduced in the future that hotel booking sites don’t have control over and which Google decides the algorithm for, which end up ranking hotels and their ads.

•   Will Hotel Finder eventually increase or decrease the dependency of hotels on indirect distribution channels?

Rapid response  

According to Jacob having the ability to search for hotels by specific dates, price, user rating and star rating is interesting. 

“Also, having them all show up on a map is fantastic.  It is very clean and easy for the initial search process,” he says. But at the same time Google Hotel Finder should highlight and push the links to the hotel’s direct distribution channels to get more hotel buy in and increased ad spend.

Booking partners are required to provide Google frequent data dumps that allows Google to maintain a mirror of each partners’ inventory in a similar way to how ITA Software deals with airline inventory. The advantage to this is that Google is able to provide lightening fast responses to queries because the query doesn’t go beyond their own data centres.

“Yes, this seems to be the case and Google is all about providing fast response to search queries.  However, building this out to get the vast expanse of hotels will take time.  Google can afford to do it, and hoteliers will comply,” says Jacob.

Gaps

According to specialists in the meta-search arena, one disadvantage to Google Hotel Finder is that uncommon queries cannot be accommodated because there’s no ability to query the partners in real-time beyond the data they’ve pre-provided to stock the cache. 

Jacobs agrees arguing that right now the queries are entirely database driven, but over time “they will study customer queries and adapt to the needs of the customer”. 

Unlike Google’s natural search results for horizontal searches, hotel search results are a matter of subjectivity and choice and dependant on a multitude of factors, where price is only one of them.

“Although the data or pictures or information from Google Places and Google Maps, along with the user reviews do add value to Google’s hotel search listings, any mechanism that doesn't guarantee real-time availability won’t work, since the post-referral customer experience will suffer,” explains Bajpai. “So, Google has to perfect an ITA like system for ‘push’ hotel availability in order to remain in sync with the hotel’s own inventory at all times, especially crucial for last minute bookings.”

Google Hotel Finder can succeed only by offering a level playing field for independent hotels, hotel chains and hotel aggregators when it comes to where the customer eventually books.

According to Bajpai, currently, a majority of the default booking links seem to point to the most well-known top OTAs or hotel aggregators. Filters such as the default ‘sort by magic’ also do not offer any explanation of their sorting algorithms. So, Google will need to be a lot more transparent with both users and hotel booking sites, if it wants to successfully balance commercial bias with real value for users.

 

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