Google: We Won't Be a Copycat in Travel

After writing Kayak's Hafner Awaits Google Hotels and the Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0 , I spoke with Google's managing director of travel and learned a lot more about what Google won't do in travel.

Here are some headlines from my conversation with Rob Torres, who emphasized that all options -- including the build versus buy equation -- are on the table. Torres said:

• Google monitors all competitors, regardless of their market share, but "we are not going to copycat. We will only do something if we can do it 10 times better than what's happening today."

• "Microsoft made a great acquisition in Farecast," but Google likely would take another route. "We don't have anything like that," Torres said, referring to Bing Travel, "and we don't intend to do something like that."

• Asked whether Google would acquire a company like Kayak or FareCompare, Torres said: "Would we acquire a Kayak just to be a Kayak? Probably not."

• "If anyone can come up with a game-changing opportunity" in travel, it would be Google, he said.

• Torres doesn't see Google introducing metasearch as an aforementioned game-changing opportunity. "The reality is that Kayak and others already are doing that very well."

• Kayak CEO Steve Hafner was being "highly speculative" and started from erroneous assumptions when he said Google doesn't care about flights and would bolster its stance in the travel business in the hotel sector. "We don't look at it as one versus another [air versus hotel]," but view the travel vertical "wholistically," Torres said. "I think our flight partners are very important. That's where they [most trip-planning queries] start."

• Asked why then Google did not further develop it's one-box flight search , launched in late 2005, Torres said "it has taken time to figure out the next step."

• Torres said Google's recent introductions of City Tours and Favorite Places, two travel applications leveraging Google Maps, were "nothing really big" in terms of the big picture and "not necessarily driving a travel product."

• A widely held view, Torres stated that the possibility of Google introducing a "transactional model" like an online travel agency are remote.

• Rather than attacking things piecemeal, Torres said Google looks to improve search across specific verticals and industries, including travel. He said Google has tremendous relatively untapped assets, including Google Maps, Google Base and YouTube.

So, now we know some of the things that Google likely will not do in travel.

Torres said that "time will tell" what steps Google would take.

Of the travel business, Torres said: "Certainly our interest hasn't waned over time."

Related Post

Google travel is coming… could it be a hotel PPC system?

Bing-Yahoo Alliance Could Be Long-Term Issue for Travelocity

The ink barely is dry on the Yahoo-Microsoft search partnership in which Yahoo will use Bing technology as the default search engine on Yahoo websites and will lead both companies' sales efforts on CPC advertising.

I have few solid answers at this point, but only questions about what this might mean for Travelocity, which is the air, car and hotel provider for Yahoo Travel.

As you know, when Microsoft launched Bing, it integrated Bing Travel (Farecast), the metasearch and advertising/media business that Microsoft acquired, into the Bing search engine.

A new Yahoo-Microsoft website outlines some of the terms of this new search alliance.

Among the key planks:

• "Microsoft's Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft's AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter's automated auction process.

• Yahoo! will innovate and 'own' the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology."

This latter element presumably is a key safeguard for Travelocity regarding what might happen to the Yahoo-Travelocity contractual relationship. That is, Yahoo will "own the user experience" on Yahoo sites and undoubtedly maintain its contractual home page link to Yahoo Travel, aka Travelocity.

But, in my opinion, this new Bing-Yahoo alliance greatly buffs up Bing Travel -- and also helps Bing Travel partner Orbitz -- because Bing-Yahoo will get about 30 percent of the U.S. search market compared to Google's roughly 65 percent.

So, six months or so from now, when consumers search for New York to San Francisco flights from the Yahoo home page using Bing search technology, one can only wonder how Yahoo will handle the display.

Will it be branded Yahoo but look like this with a link to Farecast's predictive technology?

Will the search display integrate Yahoo Travel in a way that is absent now?

Today, a New York to San Francisco air search on Yahoo displays Yahoo Travel as the fourth organic search result.

The prominence that Bing Travel gets in Bing search results is absent for Travelocity when consumers use the current Yahoo search box for travel queries.

As a company that specializes in metasearch and facilitated search, Bing Travel may have an edge over Travelocity through the Bing-Yahoo alliance because Travelocity, unless it enters travel search in new ways, focuses most of its efforts on its role as an online travel agency, although it, too, is trying to build its advertising/media business.

However, the Yahoo-Bing alliance may benefit Travelocity, too, in the short term, as advertisers welcome a viable alternative to Google.

As you may recall, there were some people who accused Travelocity of killing FareChase by offering Yahoo a sweeter deal a few months ago and convincing a restructuring Yahoo to drop its own FareChase metasearch offering.

So, I wonder if, a few years from now, we might look back at today's Microsoft-Yahoo alliance as a harbinger of the phasing out of the Travelocity-Yahoo relationship.

Nothing on this front is certain, of course, but I am sure that I am not the only person today who thought about this type of scenario.

Meanwhile, today's Microsoft-Yahoo news means that Google undoubtedly will be dusting off plans for the Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0.

Along with Twitter yesterday introducing a search box of its own on a new Twitter home page, the past couple of days have ample potential for disruption.

Update: Why Bing Travel Went Down

You might consider this a redundant question of sorts, but this is why Bing Travel went down for some 36 hours over the July 4th weekend when a transformer blew out much of the power at the Fisher Plaza facility in Seattle.

In the heat of the crisis over the weekend, much of the detail behind the incident was unavailable, but Bing provided me with some background today.

Bing Travel, known as Farecast before it was rebranded with the launch of Microsoft's Bing search engine, had "redundant counterpoints" for its core networking systems, databases and Web/applications servers, but they all were located within Fisher Plaza, said Bing spokesperson Whitney Burk.

"Microsoft has invested deeply in fortifying the Bing Travel infrastructure to handle high-volume server loads and emergency failure situations, and the amount of redundancy was increased in anticipation of the Bing launch [which took place in the beginning of June]," Burk said.

When the incident occurred last weekend, Microsoft already was in the process of transitioning the "legacy Farecast servers" to Microsoft's cloud computing platform, "the goal of which is to prevent this sort of unforeseen situation from impacting our customers," the spokesperson said.

Citing the complexity of the task, Burk said Microsoft hopes to have Bing Travel moved to cloud computing by the fall.

I will let Burk explain how cloud computing gives computing management systems new, well, "repurpose," and lessens reliance on specific hardware and specialized configurations in disaster-recovery situations.

Says Burk: "Fundamentally, cloud computing platforms offer a layer of hardware abstraction to applications that run on them. This means applications, when retooled to run on the cloud, no longer need to be sensitive or aware of the number of machines available to them running in production. Another distinction of cloud computing technology is that configurations with specialized hardware are avoided. When individual machines fail (which they sometimes do), the cloud computing management systems will automatically detect the failures and repurpose new or existing machines to run the applications.

"Because cloud computing platforms usually consist of thousands or tens of thousands of machines, adding capacity to handle increased load is simply a matter of changing some basic configurations and deploying more copies of the services and applications to additional machines. This also true for geo-redundancy. A new instance of an entire website can be brought online relatively quickly; it’s simply a matter of configuring a set of available machines in the cloud and letting the management software perform the software deployments and traffic routing."

With its data-mining and predictive technology, Bing Travel seemingly indeed runs on a complex system, and it reportedly was the last of the affected websites in Fisher Plaza to begin humming again.

Real estate website Redfin, which had redundancy capabilities at a second location, reportedly was back online in about five hours.

Meanwhile, asked about the business impact of the outage to Bing Travel, Burk declined to comment.

Bing Travel Outage a Real Downer

As of this writing, Bing Travel (a.k.a. Farecast) has been down for almost a day-and-a half.

Various news reports, including this one, indicate a fire in a downtown Seattle data center, probably caused by a blown transformer, took down Bing Travel and a host of other nontravel websites.

A photo depicts an unidentified person from one of the impacted websites hauling a server out the door of Fisher Plaza, the site of the fire.

A notice on Bing.com/travel stated:

Sorry, Bing Travel is currently unavailable

A fire occurred at Fisher Plaza in downtown Seattle just after midnight on Friday morning, July 3. A blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers. This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there has been no impact to any other aspects of Bing. We're hard at work to restore service following this unexpected event and appreciate your patience.

In the meantime, you may use Microsoft's travel partner, Orbitz, for your travel needs.

The usual travel link on the Bing homepage was removed, but the outage seemingly doesn't impact other services on Microsoft's new search engine (excuse me, "decision engine"), Bing.

The Bing Travel outage, however, does impact Bing's slew of travel industry partners, including technology providers, airlines and hotels, and certainly won't inspire consumer confidence.

However, the reputation hit may be short-lived. After all, there are few customer service issues involved because Bing Travel, as a metasearch site, is not a travel agency and doesn't book any travel.

There's no further detail yet from Bing Travel about what happened and why a back-up system, if there was one, didn't kick in. Bing Travel is a relatively small company, but Microsoft would certainly have the monies and resources to power a solution for such outages.

There will be lessons learned from this fiasco about data center security and redundancy. Many large travel companies, including Amadeus, have back-up data centers. Amadeus's data center is located in Erding, Germany, and a clone of that one is positioned 30 kilometers away.

TechFlash reported that a fire occurred at the same data center in June 2008, and a Redfin official outlined some of the steps the company took to avoid what author James Baldwin might have characterized as "The Fire Next Time."

Especially since 9/11, data center security is paramount.

Meanwhile, it was interesting this morning that a Google search for Bing Travel retrieved Bing Travel's outage announcement as the top organic result.

Conversely, a Bing search for Bing Travel produced no word of the Bing Travel unavailability, at least on the first page of results.

And, the second-highest Sponsored Link in a Google search for Bing Travel was from Kayak, which reportedly has accused Microsoft of copying Kayak's look and feel.

The other day there was a Twitter debate about whether some of the underlying technologies that help make Bing Travel and Kayak go dictate the allegedly similar GUI. I'm no expert on that question, but I tend to doubt it.

Both metasearch sites use ITA Software to power the bulk of their air searches so they can largely avoid scraping airline websites.

And, both Bing Travel and Kayak count Orbitz as a key online travel agency partner.

No, for conspiracy theorists out there, I don't think the Bing Travel outage was the result of a foray by a Kayak hit team.

Seriously, Kayak and Bing Travel, while ardent competitors, have a lot of respect for one another and both have great products.

I was just about to write that both Kayak and Bing have great tech teams, too. Well, for Bing Travel this weekend, the jury has to be out on that question.

More Bing for Your Bucks: Microsoft May Be Mulling a Farecast for Retail

I'm attending the invitation-only Microsoft Search Summit in Bellevue, Wash., today, and got an inside look at some of the thinking behind the launch of its new Bing search engine.

One headline that I took away from the conference is that Microsoft may be mulling leveraging Farecast's data-mining and predictive-pricing technology for use across major retail categories in Bing.

Another newsy tidbit I discovered is that Microsoft's reported $80-$100 million Bing branding campaign may just be the beginning since there are plans on the drawing board to pour "six to seven times that amount" into Bing advertising over the next three or four years, a Microsoft employee told me.

Regarding a potential initiative on retail-pricing predictions, a couple of Bing officials hinted that something like this might be on the agenda, although I didn't get the feeling that consumers would be able to use Bing to delve into the pricing fluctuations of a Nikon D90 digital camera any time soon.

As I wrote a few days ago about the new Farecast-MSN Travel consolidation into Bing Travel, Farecast, acquired by Microsoft a little more than a year ago, brings tremendous value to the travel-search experience.

For example, Farecast studies historical airfare trends and informs me to "wait" and not buy a $350 LAX-ORD flight on American Airlines because the fare likely will drop.

Farecast has been doing this sort of predicting for several years in the travel sector and has the wherewithal to lead efforts for Bing to get involved in predicting retail pricing across the Bing Shopping vertical.

So imagine if Bing Shopping, which offers consumers a Cashback program, can also implement pricing predictions on major retail items?

That could be a winning combination in terms of providing value to consumers.

Bing Travel General Manager Hugh Crean says a key issue in mining retail categories for pricing trends is whether there are "signaling" data to study.

Another issue, of course, is that many retail items have a short shelf-life so these types of products might be unsuitable targets for examining their pricing trends.

On other issues, there was an under-current of some controversy at the conference concerning the way Bing takes steps at times to keep users glued to Bing.com instead of facilitating their navigation to third-party websites.

David Berkowitz summed up the issue in Advertising Age with his post, "Microsoft's Bing Is a Search Portal, not a Decision Engine."

For example, after conducting a Bing search for a Nikon D90 digital camera, the top result comes in the form of a Bing instant answer, or summary, and when you click on that result, you remain on Bing.com.

Some conference attendees muttered that Microsoft is exercising too much control over the user in stealing traffic from third-party sites without compensating them for their content.

Members of the Bing team, and some conference attendees, countered that third-party sites would probably welcome the Bing exposure, and that this free publicity would drive traffic to their sites nonetheless.

In the travel sector, some suppliers, including American Airlines, have pursued legal actions against companies that scrape their content without permission and sans a partner relationship.

So, maybe we will be hearing more on the "search-portal" front in the future.

The Bing Travel Experience: So Far, So Good

In advance of Microsoft releasing its new search engine, Bing, I took Bing out for a brief test drive.

Bing has some features that are very cool, but I didn't see anything that makes me believe that Bing will significantly rain on Google's parade. (Although the impact of Microsoft's planned $80 to $100 million marketing campaign for Bing can't be dismissed.)

But, one area where Bing really sets itself apart is in the travel user experience (or UX, for you geeks out there) because Bing, unlike Google and Yahoo, has a travel innovator, Farecast, in its portfolio.

To be more precise and newsy, Microsoft has Bing Travel, a melding and rebranding of Farecast and MSN Travel (including Farecast for flights and hotels, and Orbitz for vacation packages, cars and cruises), at its disposal.

By the way, a side note to Yahoo: You decided to kill metasearch engine FareChase, but think how you might have leveraged it to enhance the travel-search experience within Yahoo search had you not been beholden to Travelocity and given the FareChase team some resources and clout in this post-Yahoo Travel, AOL Travel and MSN Travel era.

About Bing generally, one of its most appealing features is that when you move your cursor to the right of a search result, a box opens summarizing that search result.

This feature is huge because users can avoid all of those unproductive, back-and- forth clicks and decide up-front on an informed basis about whether they should click on a result.

However, I don't see this mouse-over feature as something that Google or Yahoo couldn't quickly emulate if they choose.

And, Bing has nifty Images, Videos, Related Searches and Search History features running down a left-hand column alongside the search-results page in an easily accessible, very clean-looking manner.

And, like Twitter's Trending Topics, the Bing homepage offers Popular Now links, which today featured French Open Tennis, Desmond Hatchett, Christina Aguilera and Jay Leno. (Meanwhile, Twitter's top two Trending Topics were #myweakness and, ahem, Google Wave.)

OK, so here's the travel angle.

The Bing preview version lists travel as one of only six categories or verticals (Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps and Travel) on the Bing homepage in a bow to the primacy of travel as a key Web category.

And, at least for flight search for now, Bing's deft use of Bing Travel, including Farecast's predictive technology, sets it apart from flight searches on Google and Yahoo.

For example, a Google search of EWR to LAX retrieves a Google flight-search box as the top result with a link to Flights from Newark, NJ to Los Angeles, CA, which defaults to an Expedia search. However, users can input their departing and returning dates and also conduct traditional, if unexciting searches of CheapTickets, Expedia, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity in separate windows.

Ho-hum.

A Yahoo search of EWR to LAX offers no such shortcut at all. Kudos to Yahoo for its agnosticism, but users would have to scroll down to the relative boondocks of the seventh organic search result to access any reference to Yahoo Travel, powered by Travelocity.

And, now, Bada-Bing. (For international readers -- ha -- James Gleick defines the term as "American slang “suggesting something happening suddenly, emphatically, or easily and predictably; ’Just like that!’, ’Presto!’"

OK then, Presto.

A Bing search of EWR to LAX produces a much richer and more informational experience than do the Google and Yahoo searches.

The first result in the Bing search is what Bing Travel General Manager Hugh Crean refers to as an "instant answer." It comes with a link to "Cheap tickets from Newark to Los Angeles" and a "Fares Predicted to Rise or Hold Steady" graphic, both of which take the user to a wealth of tools from Farecast, I mean, Bing Travel.

Other links within the Bing instant answer resulting from an EWR to LAX search include:

$239 EWR>LAX
All deals from New York
All deals to Los Angeles
30-Day Outlook for EWR>LAX

Clicking on the graphic or main link in the instant answer brings the Bing searcher to an integrated Bing Travel page where the prospective traveler quickly finds out that Farecast predicts with 80 percent confidence that the fares will rise or be steady over the next seven days.

Users can then get details about Farecast's fare predictions, view fare trends on a calendar, search for flights (while filtering in or out their preferences) using Bing Travel metasearch or conduct one-window-at-a-time searches using booking engines from Hotwire, Expedia and Priceline.

There is just much more meat on the bone in travel searches using Bing in contrast to Google and Yahoo, largely because of Microsoft's acquisition of Farecast in April 2008.

Bing's introduction is an important development for the travel industry.

Big bad Microsoft (and it almost pains me to say this, given its legacy of Windows and Internet Explorer bullying) paved a new path when it put a travel search engine, Farecast, as the lead of MSN Travel.

And, now, Microsoft has given added weight to travel as a key vertical and has integrated it into part of its overall search strategy and not, to borrow a phrase, albeit out of context, from AOL, as some sort of "walled garden."

In the Bing preview version at least, travel has primacy on the Bing homepage. Consider that it has that prime real estate while the following are absent as standalone verticals: autos, real estate, movies, music and finance etc.

"Now we are part of an overall search strategy that will be in front of all consumers, coming through Bing and Bing Travel," Crean told me.

In fact, Crean is now part of the Bing search team, helping to develop overall search strategy, and he reports to a vice president of search.

Although Google is too, well, big and bad to admit it, I expect Bing's on-time arrival will hasten efforts in Google land to improve the travel-search experience.

And, that increased attention can't be bad for travel.

Bada-Bing.

Meta-morphosis: TripAdvisor Metasearch Displays 'Brand'-New Stuff

Travel agencies and airlines long-complained that metasearch tools don't allow for branding and differentiation, but now TripAdvisor's new flight search tool is heeding their messages.
TripAdvisor started displaying airline and online travel agencies' branding messages within its flight grid. Again, I'm not talking about ads served above or off to the side of flight-search results, but messaging within the flight grid.
When I searched for an LAX-JFK flight, TripAdvisor displayed a flight bookable on VirginAmerica.com, with the tag line, “This is How to Fly;” the same flight through Travelocity, with the tag line, “You’ll Never Roam Alone;” and the Virgin flight through Expedia, with the tag line, “Go With Confidence.”
With OTA booking fees tossed aside, at least for now, merchandising and differentiation is key.
That's because, as is par for the course, all three companies offered the flight for the same fare, $259.
But, at least, for the first time that I’ve seen, the airline and the two OTAs had a chance to get their branding message across.
Baby steps, but significant nonetheless.
So, I agree with what Yen Lee said in the UpTake Travel Industry Blog that there are still huge opportunities in metasearch and transforming metasearch tools into something that offers a better consumer-shopping experience is key.
And as Rick Seaney of FareCompare and Susan Black of Chimney RockPartners commented, it looks like unbundled, a la carte or standalone (you pick the word) airline products, from lounge access to Perrier Jouet, may be the next sweet spot for the airline.com channel.
It puts the onus on companies like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Travelzoo, Farecast, FareCompare and Mobissimo, to display these disparate offerings in a consumer-friendly manner.
Not easy, at all.

Yapta-Yapta-Doo

With apologies to Fred Flinstone and Yapta, too, I have to say, "Yabba-Yabba-Doo," about some of the pro-consumer developments taking place in the flight-booking arena.
And, thankfully for all concerned, I don't say, "Yabba-Dabba-Doo," very often. (Incidentally, for those young folks playing on Twitter, as I do, Fred Flinstone was a cartoon character "back then," as my kids like to put it.
Anyway, in the old days of online-travel booking, before the days of metasearch and the developments I'm about to describe, you did some comparison-shopping, booked a flight and hoped you got a decent price.
But, today, you not only have Kayak, Fly.com, Mobissimo and a cast of thousands (I exaggerate) to help you mix and match fares, but Farecast will dive deep into its data mine to predict if the fare will go up, down or sideways in the next week, month or holiday weekend, for that matter.
Then, this week, we have a flurry of new activity by Travelocity, with its PriceGuardian program, and Priceline with its Pricedrop Protection scheme, both of which refund money to Joe Consumer if Betty Consumer (no relation) later booked a flight or vacation package for the same itinerary at a cheaper price. Priceline's Pricedrop (it does have a nice ring to it) even refunds the difference to Ralph Consumer, who successfully made a flight bid using Name-Your-Own Price, if Nancy Consumer reserved a no-bid published fare at a lower price.
The likelihood of that happening is so remote that the data-crunchers at Farecast would have to give you the odds.
So, if Travelocity and Priceline are silently, behind the scenes, monitoring fares on your behalf (and they promise they will) to see if later bookers got lower deals on the same itineraries, Yapta instructs consumers how to get credits from the airlines if travelers booked directly on an airline website and subsequently the fare dropped. And for $15, Yapta even will phone the airline for you.
What happened to the days of pressing the enter key on your PC and booking a flight -- and just winging it, hoping you got a deal?
It's all about empowering consumers, and making the travel industry more transparent.
That's why I say: "Yapta-Yapta-Doo!"