Is the Next Great Disruptor in Travel... Google?

If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have missed some recent moves by Google to further extend the company’s offering in travel. Notably, a couple weeks ago Google’s VP of Product Management for Travel detailed the company’s rollout of a “travel insights tool” which primarily delivers price forecasting for flights and hotels. But more significant, I believe, is the company’s quiet launch of a new standalone hotel search and booking product, bringing Google’s hotel capability to the level of what it has had for flights.

As someone who has spent the past two decades studying the travel industry and developing consumer products for travelers, I’ve always been a little mystified that Google hasn’t been more explicitly ambitious in the category. The customer journey in travel—from the moment you begin contemplating taking a trip to booking it to actually going—is an incredibly fragmented one. Consumers engage with dozens and dozens of different sources of information and potential service providers before booking, and those numbers grow yet more once people hit the road. There’s always been a huge opportunity for any company with the ambition (and the resources) to make that journey more seamless.

And here Google has tremendous advantages. I recently led a portfolio of editorial brands in the media business, and as any publisher knows, a large audience of users who come to you organically—i.e., customers you don’t have to pay to acquire—is one of the most valuable things you can have. If you’re attracting those users in the right mindset, that’s even better. I would suspect that Google, as the dominant search provider, is engaging an insanely high percentage of people globally at some point in their travel journey, and particularly in the research and planning stages before they book. (And it’s not just about standard search; think of how valuable a product like Maps is for travelers, even before you travel, now that Google has layered so much rich information into the product.) So Google already has the users, and it gets them when they are thinking about travel.

Google has had very useful travel products for a while now—Search, Maps, Flights—and while there is some great integration between the products behind the scenes, there’s still no overarching travel "idea" that stitches everything together and helps consumers see Google as a true travel partner. The Trips app looked to be a step in that direction, but Google hasn’t made too much of it. (I think it’s fairly typical of Google, which always feels so product-led to me, to miss the opportunity around branding and marketing itself in a bigger way that makes sense to consumers.)

At any rate, the new Hotels product makes me wonder if Google is coming around to developing a more holistic offering for travelers, at least when it comes to booking. As Raini Hamdi at Skift noted, this would have potentially major implications for the OTAs, most notably Expedia Group and Booking Holdings, along with others that occupy blue chip positions in booking like Airbnb. If Google wanted to own the booking space, they’d have a good shot. And if they did, what would the point of the other brands be? With less price and inventory variation out there than ever, the platform you use to research and book is largely a matter of personal preference—and, frankly, habit. If Google simply made it easier and more seamlessly integrated into the rest of your experience via its other products, it probably wouldn’t be hard for them to capture a much larger swath of users.

If I were Google, I’d go for it, but I would start thinking about how to build a brand around this, rather than just continuing to introduce and integrate new products under the big Google umbrella. Even though you’ve got the consumers engaging with you already, if you want them to adopt new behaviors, it’s critical to build a story and an idea around it, so they understand why they should.

And if I were Mark Okerstrom at Expedia or Glenn Fogel at Booking, I would be laying the groundwork to compete better in a universe in which Google gets much more ambitious about travel—and/or try to beat them to the punch. What’s your value proposition beyond the price search and the booking itself? What kind of emotional connection does the consumer have to your offerings, and to your brands? Airbnb currently sits in a better position vis-à-vis these questions, I believe, since the brand has genuine emotional resonance for its legions of users, particularly millennial and Gen Z consumers, and it is already showing an appetite for brand diversification. But for any company whose model is based on booking, I would argue that now is the time to think more expansively about your business and your brand, and evolve into a position that is more competitive and defensible in the long run, because it encompasses meaningful, differentiated things that a Google can't (or won't) do. Because if and when Google gets more serious, it will mean business.

Read my companion piece, in which I argue that the time is now for the emergence of a travel "superbrand," here.

Nathan Lump is a marketing and brand strategist, and the former Editor in Chief of Travel + Leisure and former Editorial Director of the Time Inc. Luxury & Lifestyle Group.