NB: This is a guest article by César López, business development manager at Mirai, a Spain-based hotel technology and consultancy service.
A new actor has appeared on the great soap opera that is hotel search - Google. In a new, starring role, it has the potential to stir up the marketplace and persaude the other actors to adapt their characters.
Will the audience accept it? Will it change the story or will it just turn out to be another cameo appearance?
This new actor has something to offer
The critics have been talking about its appearance for months. Rumours started a year ago when Google bought ITA Software, the technology platform to give it flight search and shopping tools (and a fair amount more).
The purchase confirmed its intention to take part in the tourism soap opera, probably in a major role throughout the series.
Twelve months later, an episode called Hotel Finder was first aired in the US.
The first appearance on-stage has not let anybody down. It remains faithful to its style with a minimalist screen presence which is clear and at the same time looking for that special relation with the audience.
At the moment it is also totally ad-free, its character promises you that it will find hotels for you, and that is exactly what it does, with discretion, without any complications and with the speed and agility that have become synonymous with all its previous performances.
Don’t be evil: will Google always be the goodie?
Google doesn’t like playing evil roles. "Don’t be evil" is its informal slogan. That’s what it says in the code of conduct, after all.
However, it’s got into a series where the characters have different interests, but are connected at the same time. How will it translate its good intentions?
Will it try to keep everybody happy? Will it just simply fall into its place without shooting anybody or threaten the status quo among the cast?
To make things even more complicated, and adding some excitement, Google already has its own interests, and preserving them will be its own personal challenge: especially Adwords, a very important element of this series.
In the last episode of the soap opera, the audience was mainly focusing on the torturous love-hate relationship between the two main characters of the latest season: the hotel, eager to get the maximum number of people sleeping with it every night, and the superhero, Booking.com, which also competes wholeheartedly for the love of the client and is more successful at getting it, especially because it manages to get the customer’s loyalty.
Will it ask for commission? Will the hotel end up paying it?
What makes it stand out from the others is that the Google actor lives off publicity, not off commissions, and what it shows at the moment is the prices as "Ads".
These ads are a new system that Google is testing specifically for hotel prices. At the moment, it only gathers data from the big middlemen, without showing directly the prices of the provider.
The mere fact of charging money for being able to show the price, even if it’s unbiased, it’s not good news. This situation contributes to perpetuate the eternal system of multiple levels of middlemen, with every one of them asking for their slice of the cake.
At the moment the hotel pays Google through commissions to the middlemen.
The innovation around Hotel Finder is that it could open the doors to new opportunities, and hotels could pay directly to be able to display their own pricing. Great opportunity, but at the same time it goes against the possibility that direct sales could be cheaper.
So, will Google actually just end up with having just a cameo role or will it end up being the leading role?
From the first performance which made it a star, with its legendary character as a search engine, Google has taken on many other roles: some of them have been great successes (GMail, Adwords, Android, Maps), others were great flops which it had to let go for lack of audience (Wave, Google Video, Buzz).
Google tries everything, its filmography with many small roles is larger than what most people would imagine. Google itself introduces them with Labs.
But will Hotel Finder make an impact and consolidate itself, or will it end up as a forgotten curiosity?
At the moment, Google has been clever enough to label this new performance as "experiment", although that doesn’t mean a lot. Gmail spent years as a beta project and when it moved on from this status, not that long ago, it was already one of the main email platforms.
The leading actor until now… threatened?
Of course, Booking.com appears also in this episode with its price and its link. Booking.com is already a seasoned actor, used to performing its best in any scene.
In fact, one of the reasons for its popularity is that besides being good in its individual performances, it also captivates the audience with its cameos in third parties ventures like affiliates or metasearch engines.
It wants to be in all the scenes and victorious with its super-powers (for instance, with the minimum price it apparently obsesses about).
Others compete with similar roles
Bit-part players are the groups of comparison sites and metasearch engines - they work as a directory for hotels, price comparison websites and they point the audience towards the superhero - the middlemen.
It seems as if Google Hotel Finder is not offering the audience anything new than other less important actors they hadn’t already tried, such as Kayak or Trivago.
The only significant difference is the prominence that the hotel’s website gets from Google.
Every one of them displays different styles and nuances - Kayak prefers a lot of information, while Google prefers simplicity and Trivago markets itself through its omnipresent TV ads.
But, in essence, they are fighting for the same character. So why is Google expected to get more attention than the others have got so far? Is it using its brand name to attract the audience?
Introducing our man, the hotel website
Back to the soap opera. A new episode starts with good news: Google seems to want to make friends with a hotel’s website and it gives it a permanent space that won’t go unnoticed by the audience.
Let’s hope that those good intentions will be fruitful in the forthcoming new season also displaying prices. That would be something totally new on screen.
Where are the old stars?
Having such a young and attractive actor as Google in the series reminds us of the leading actors of previous seasons, many of which disappeared off the screen a while ago - tour operators and physical agencies.
We know that they are still successful in summer cinemas and tourist resorts. They are fighting back and threatening with returning with successful urban ticket sellers, even with superhero roles.
They seem to be very sure of their super-powers: "value add". However, scriptwriters do not appear to have a space for them. This is normal - previous episodes have been shot in areas that are totally alien to them. SEO, SEM and social networks.
So what can the hotel do?
As you can see, there are more questions than answers about the future of the series, but it hasn’t been written yet and nobody quite knows whether there are further series planned.
At the moment, Hotel Finder is only present on American screens, although expected to be released in Europe over the next few months. While we wait for it to arrive, the hotel can prepare itself in two different ways:
- Making sure that it has filled out the relevant information and optimized for Google Places, a platform that is being increasingly used to identify and gather information from companies.
- Thinking about an issue that many hotels find difficult to consider: direct sales are becoming cheaper.
Google Hotel Finder forces hotels to think about it again. Is the hotel ready to invest to appear directly paying the same as for appearing through middlemen? Many hotels will problably comply, however the belief that direct sales carry lower costs is cracking up.
This soap opera has a completely new mentality.
NB: This is a guest article by César López, business development manager at Mirai, a Spain-based hotel technology and consultancy service.