Google Quietly Releases Its Hotel Booking Destination With Potentially Huge Implications
In a span of just a few months, Google's threat in booking travel is looming even larger. Indeed, Skift said last October Google's new hotel search is presenting a greater threat to booking rivals. Now the tech giant has added a full-fledged destination site for hotels, without any major fanfare, and has potential implications for booking sites, as well as Airbnb, on the lines of what it has done with its already very-popular Google Flights.
Richard Holden, Google's vice president of product management, travel, wrote about the new features in Google Flights and Hotels in a blog published late last week, and quietly slipped in a development we have been waiting for a year or so now, the full-fledged site for hotel meta search site and booking engine.
Once the users goes to Google's hotel site and selects a hotel, a "Book a room" button is very prominent. When the user selects one of the online travel agency or other metasearch advertisers, the traveler navigates to the third-party site for booking. But there is often an option to book right on Google for Travelocity or Agoda, for example.
