Blog homeIts long been rumoured that Google is working on “something” in the travel sector - which some people have called “Troogle”. Some blogs - and magazines - have even reported that Google has approached larger travel companies for data feeds. However, Google has denied most reports.
On behalf of a client, we were doing some digging the other day in Google Base. This is the newish service that Google launched a few months ago - and is available at http://base.google.com
Within Google Base you can add travel products - giving start and end dates, tour itineraries, images etc. Google have created a category - called “Travel packages” for travel companies to use. An example, from a Mongolian tour operator (not one of our clients), can be found here (note this will expire after 30 days). What is interesting is that Google Base allows anyone (with a Google account) to upload tours - for free. You can upload via text file, RSS, Atom etc…. all quite interesting.
Yahoo already have a travel feed upload service available to smaller travel companies - view the specs - however to be part of this, you have to pay per click (PPC) - i.e. its an advertising service. Within the Google Base service you can attach standard Google adverts, if you wish, but at this time its not required, although its not clear how much traffic Google Base gets vs the normal Google searches.
Google will also take payments for your products - on their site. However they have exluded payments for “Tours (including hotel, flight, and car reservations), travel clubs and timeshare properties”. Events though should be OK.
Enough of our findings, here is an opinion. Very unlikely to be true as its just a guess!
If we were to launch a travel website - and our strategy was mainly advertising rather than product sales (or based on search), I would start “beta” with something like a travel search within Google Base. Google’s history here is quite strong - for example they didn’t release a new news site - they created a search mechanism for existing news. So when Google denied launching a travel site in competition with Expedia and Travelocity - perhaps they were just misleading us all a little bit - and really they are setting up in competition with some of the “meta search” sites out there instead. (and then working on the advertising model). I.e. they denied it because the question was wrong.
What does this mean to smaller tour operators? Overall, this should be good news - as whatever Google are upto - it seems that smaller travel companies will be part of it - as long as you can create a feed in the right format. Right now you can put up tours into Google Base for free. Not sure how much impact this will have commercially (on tour sales), but its something to do if time allows. Again, it may only be the big players who have the technology backing who get there first (or at all) but lookout for integration with TourCMS coming soon, designed for the smaller tour operators and event organisers.
Last thought - its actually quite difficult to find the tours that ARE loaded in Google Base already, using the Google Base search. (Its easy to find events). So although Google have gone out of their way to create a travel packages format, they don’t make it easy for end users to actually find this uploaded content….. so maybe there really is a Google travel site coming soon…. where all this content will be presented - and perhaps it will be called Troogle!
Related links
- Google denies Troogle - Travolution
Alex
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