NB: This is a guest article by Joseph Rubin, president of the Interactive Travel Service Association (ITSA).
As we head into the busy travel season, travel agencies – both online and storefront – are poised once again to handle significant volumes of consumer traffic.
Online travel companies play a vital role helping airlines, hotels and other travel partners reach millions of consumers around the world through their one-stop travel shopping sites, and provide consumers with decision-making power to research, compare and purchase travel that fits their interest and budget.
Further, because of the transparency and competition that OTCs facilitate, they help lower prices for consumers, and to increase travel bookings for suppliers – a win-win-win for all involved.
For example, 40% of all travel is booked through travel agencies, and one third of all ecommerce in the US is travel based. So it is little wonder that Google – the Goliath of the Internet – wants in on the action.
Google closed its deal to acquire ITA Software for $700 million in April this year and has since launched the first version of its Google Flight Search tool.
For the travel shopper, what could be better? The biggest search engine in the world providing a search for consumers to get the best air fares, right? Wrong.
As that old adage reminds us: let the buyer beware.
The first version of Google Flight is not very impressive, with only a handful of airlines participating. No doubt it will get updated and expanded, but unless the underlying model changes dramatically, the choices will remain limited, and the prices will remain higher than traditional online travel companies - not a good tool for consumers to search for travel.
The reason for these shortcomings are clear, given that the parameters of Google Flight were clearly dictated by the small group of airlines that were Google Flight’s launch partners, and their intentional exclusion of agenices from the mix of search results.
Or, as Jeremy Wertheimer, the vice president for travel at Google, recently indicated when asked why Google Flight did not provide links and offerings from OTCs to help consumers search and compare, said:
"…we work with airline partners, we are in the airline industry, just as we are in the hotel industry. We are not actually in the stand-alone-technology-we-do-what-we-want industry – we’re in the airline industry. And our airline partners were very clear – as we discussed with them this year – that they were not interested in participating if we provided links to OTAs."
Wertheimer’s comments speak for themselves as to why consumers who think they are going to Google Flight for impartial searches and the best information should be wary – they are not going to get an impartial search result with multiple choices like a traditional OTA, but instead are likely to end up with a limited menu of options, as dictated by the airlines.
And, it remains to be seen whether Google Flight will disclose those arrangements and limitations to consumers. It sounds like the airlines are calling the shots. And it sounds like Google Flight is perfectly fine with that arrangement, though their customers may not be.
In other words, instead of a typical Google search result, which delivers a significant supply of supposedly unbiased search results, Google Flight appears to simply serve as a search engine with a limited focus, and a clear, but undisclosed, bias toward a small group of suppliers.
This highlights another shortcoming of Google Flight for consumers – the lack of consumer protections that it provides.
The US Department of Transportation plays an active role in policing consumer protection rules with regard to advertising and transparency of information.
The established OTAs abide by very stringent rules with regard to how information is displayed and conveyed, and whether search results are biased (they are not).
However, whether Google Flight has embraced those same disclosures and protections is unclear. So the buyer should beware. And so should Google.
NB: This is a guest article by Joseph Rubin, president of the Interactive Travel Service Association (ITSA).