Richard Holden, vice president, Google
Richard Holden will speak during an Executive Interview at Phocuswright Europe.
Ahead of the event, he discusses how Google has no plans to become an OTA, the importance of search and more.
What topic should we be discussing right now, and why?
At Google, we study user behavior to identify opportunities to help our partners find new customers and serve their loyal following. However, in a recent study we did with Phocuswright, less than 50% of travelers felt that the travel offers they recall receiving were very or extremely relevant to them.
We focus on building experiences that are truly useful to people, and we think machine learning based on anonymized consumer data can help deliver relevant information to users and reduce the noise. We and our partners in the industry are still at the beginning stages of making this a reality for all travelers, but the opportunity to help users and partners is large.
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People are becoming more impatient and demand relevant information at their fingertips. They crave tailored offerings. In a study with Ipsos, 76% of mobile travelers said they would be more likely to sign up for a brand’s loyalty program if a travel company were to tailor information and offerings to that user.
This increased relevance can mean not only happy travelers, but also more profit for travel companies. If a travel brand did more to tailor information and the overall trip experience based on personal preferences or past behavior, 36% of US travelers would likely pay more for those services.
The convergence of machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing will make increased relevance possible for travel companies of all sizes - no matter how sophisticated your technological capabilities are. This creates a tremendous opportunity for all of us to simplify and streamline the entire consumer journey. We can help travelers get whatever information they need about a new destination, flight, hotel or activity as quickly and easily as possible with smarter recommendations that learn and evolve over time.
What is the most misunderstood element of your role and your company?
The most misunderstood thing about Google remains the impression that we want to become an OTA. Google provides people with answers to questions they’re asking and connects people to partners in the moments where it makes sense.
As a company, Google is slowly transforming from a search engine that provides 10 blue links to a technology company that seeks to help people get things done in the real world. That includes helping people with their tasks - like travel planning.
We want to help consumers by streamlining the travel planning and booking process and provide our partners with cost-effective, highly qualified leads. Our flight, hotel and other travel offerings give consumers fast, comprehensive tools for travel planning, and Book on Google allows a consumer to easily and quickly complete the booking process.
Our partners remain the merchant of record for the transaction, and the consumer is clearly informed that he/she is transacting with our partner. We are merely facilitating the transaction with a focus on maximizing conversions for our partners and have no interest in supplanting the primary customer relationship.
If you could change one thing about how the travel industry functions, what would it be?
Like many in the industry, I chose to focus on travel because I'm passionate about the industry and the personal impact travel can have on all of us. If there is one thing I could change, it would be how complex travel planning still is.
Google and our partners have done much to make travel information more accessible and actionable, but travel planning is still more complex than we all wish it were. This is an area where machine learning and personalization will help a lot, but there is still much work to do!
What is the biggest opportunity in online travel in 2018?
At Google, we find that consumer behavior is often pushing us - and our partners - to move faster. We constantly run experiments and collaborate with our user experience research teams to investigate how people's digital behaviors are changing, how they’re using our current products and how we can make our products more user-friendly.
The most misunderstood thing about Google remains the impression that we want to become an OTA.
Richard Holden - Google
The consumer research we’re doing is pointing to the fact that people are becoming more impatient and more demanding of the technology in their lives; we focus on learning how people use technology and then try to meet their expectations in the products we build.
Our most important principle at Google is: “Focus on the user first and everything else will follow.” This principle, alongside a commitment to connecting our partners to the highest quality leads, is as important today as it has ever been.
I still see search as a huge opportunity for online travel. People have become research-obsessed, even about the small stuff. Today, people are researching more than ever, so each decision - be it big or small - is an informed one.
We’ve seen an 80% growth in people searching "best” + a product from their mobile phone in the past two years. Growth has been even higher for small things like “best umbrella” with 140% growth, “best travel accessories” with 110% growth and “best toothbrush” with 100% growth over the last two years.
What single piece of advice would you give a new business entering the travel industry?
For a new business entering the travel industry, it is critical that you understand your customers, where they are and what they value; your strategy will organically cascade from there. Once you understand your target customer, your second priority is to optimize the distribution of your or your partners’ inventory across all potential distribution channels.
For travel distribution, mobile is increasingly important to travel shoppers, but desktop is also still very important, especially in Western Europe and the US. We just published an infographic that dug into this. In all markets, travelers are still more likely to feel completely comfortable planning an entire trip on a desktop than a smartphone. While travelers may feel it is easy to shop and book on mobile, they are not entirely ready to plan a whole trip solely on a smartphone.
Overall, it’s increasingly less about the technology and its form factor and more about understanding your customers and supplying them with what they want wherever they are.
We reported that hotel reviews on Google more than doubled in 2017. Why do you think more travelers are turning to Google as a review source?
The more reviews a hotel has on Google, the better the user experience for travelers searching for hotels on Google. Reviews appear next to a hotel’s listing on Maps and Search across desktops, tablets and mobile devices.
Over the past few years, Google has actively sought reviews through multiple channels. First and foremost, this includes collaborating with many of our partners to feature their reviews. That gives users more content to leverage, and it also increases discovery of partner reviews and drives valuable free traffic to them. We are also working to directly build our corpus of reviews through channels like the successful Local Guides program, prompting for reviews through Maps and soliciting reviews through our Google Opinion Rewards app.
The overall reviews ecosystem at Google has been thriving. This increase in volume has led people to expect Google to provide quality reviews. We've invested in improving our reviews consumption experience, making it easier for users to find valuable user feedback about a hotel through our unified reviews module.
Looking at Flights, what advantage does Google have over traditional metasearch sites?
Fifty-five percent of travelers surveyed agree that they have to check too many sources of travel information before making a decision. Google Flights has a distinct advantage that we hear from consumers whenever we survey them about why they love flights - it’s fast.
People have become research-obsessed, even about the small stuff.
Richard Holden - Google
The “freshness” - or real-time accuracy - of flight results is crucial. On Google Flights, we’re analyzing trillions of bookable flight options, constantly computing and recomputing ticket prices in the background - before you even type your search query - so that Google Flights can give you an answer in real-time. Google’s computing power allows us to calculate more ticket prices faster than anywhere else on the web.
We don’t just calculate the price for a single flight when you enter your dates and destination. We comparison shop, trawling through thousands of other possible flight combinations, including nearby dates and airports and let you know if there are better deals.
Often the best flight is not the cheapest - "book me a one-stop flight from Chicago to New York, with a 15-hour layover in Atlanta,” said no one ever - so we’ll suggest ways to save by flying on another day or leaving from a neighboring airport.
Organizing as much information about the available flights as possible, as quickly as possible, allows you to make smarter - and more confident - decisions. For instance, we use historical data to make sure we’re balancing price with people’s comfort. We know that, for example, a traveler will happily pay $10 more for a direct flight versus one with a stop-over. In fact, one in five travelers choose a flight that’s not the cheapest, in the name of convenience.
One of the other features people love is our exploration capabilities. If you search for a flight from San Francisco to New York on a holiday weekend, for example, Google Flights’ Explore view might also suggest that you could go to Tokyo for the same price.
Our goal is give people as much information as possible at a glance so they can skip the anxiety that comes with booking flights and focus on the fun parts of the journey.
How are voice products like Home changing the traveler experience?
I think the key way digital assistants like Google Assistant embedded in the Home device or available on millions of Android devices are changing the traveler experience is that they’re increasing traveler expectations around what’s possible.
We did research with Phocuswright in 2017 that showed that interest in using digital assistant technology for travel is high - right behind using assistants for shopping. More than one in three travelers across regions are interested in using a digital assistant to research travel and/or make travel reservations. Among travel-related activities, consumers are most interested in using a digital assistant to search for hotels, things to do and flights.
The fact is, until about 15 years ago, most travel reservations were made using voice - talking to a human being on the phone. Today, almost 70% of requests to the Google Assistant are expressed in natural language, and the Assistant allows us to move forward into increasingly more intuitive and human interactions with technology. The Assistant can offer travelers the ease of natural language and dialogue, but the results can be what we call “multimodal” so you don’t have to write down everything you’re hearing.
We can potentially use graphics, tables, the screen on your phone; it does not have to be voice only. We think this is a definite improvement over either a phone call or having to type everything in, using multiple date-pickers, and re-entering your dates over and over.
We're very excited about the potential of voice search and its travel use-cases, but at the end of the day, the point is to make people's lives easier.