Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, September 7. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
25.08.2023 - 14:11 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal
While Alphabet, Google’s parent, saw advertising revenue tick down 1.6 percent in the fourth quarter, travel and retail revenue increased.
If you exclude a substantial adverse foreign exchange impact in the fourth quarter, which ended December 31, Alphabet’s “search and other” revenue, which includes advertising, would have increased “moderately,” said Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, “reflecting an increase in retail and travel, offset partially by a decline in finance.”
Alphabet announced the layoffs of 12,000 employees, or 6 percent of its workforce last month, and Google Flights seems to have been particularly hard hit on a percentage basis. That move came as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday the company is “reengineering” its costs across the company.
“It also includes a careful focus on our hiring needs, reflecting these priorities as well as efficiencies in our technical infrastructure and productivity improvements from our AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools,” Pichai said.
Despite the layoffs in January, Alphabet hired 3,455 employees in the fourth quarter, with most in technical roles. Senior engineers and product managers were among those fired at Google Flights.
Porat, speaking in Alphabet’s fourth quarter and full-year 2022 earnings call Thursday, said advertisers reduced their spend in the fourth quarter compared with the third quarter. For full-year 2022, she added, cost per click rates on advertising declined 1 percent while the number of clicks jumped 10 percent.
In the fourth quarter, Google’s search and other revenue declined 1.6 percent to $42.6 billion. Net income in the fourth quarter fell 33 percent year over year to $13.6 billion.
In essence, Alphabet found that travel advertising trended upwards while some other sectors, including finance, were casualties of macroeconomic conditions and uncertainties.
Such trends are consistent with a new Tripadvisor study that found that roughly 75 percent of survey respondents who plan to tamp down discretionary spending in 2023 plan no such cuts in their vacation budgets.
Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, reported similar trends regarding travel revenue a day earlier.
“The largest positive contributors to year-over-year growth in Q4 were the travel and health care verticals, though both are relatively smaller verticals in absolute share,” Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li told financial analysts Wednesday’s during the company’s fourth quarter and full-year 2022 earnings call.
Alphabet’s earnings call was rife with talk about how it will use artificial intelligence across its businesses to maximize efficiencies, including increasing conversions for advertisers, and to foster new opportunities.
“In 2022,
Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, September 7. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
U.S. travelers will be able to book some flights right on Google for the time being to take advantage of a Google flight price guarantee, despite the shuttering of the Book on Google feature for flights internationally almost a year ago.
Airbnb thinks it’s unfair that the European Commission is proposing increased data-sharing requirements on short-term rental providers across the zone, but Google seemingly is escaping the clampdown.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, January 26. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
Especially heavy layoffs at Google Flights, including senior managers and engineers who joined Google with the ITA Software acquisition in 2011, could signal strategy shifts in the company’s multifaceted airline business, Skift has learned.
Google made changes to Google Flights and Hotels related to transparency in hotel reviews and pricing under pressure from the European Commission — but stopped short of making those modifications elsewhere in the world.
An antitrust lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Justice and eight states filed Tuesday against Google details how its rigorous use of consumer data helped enable the company to dominate all sides of the online advertising industry.
Google said Tuesday it will debut globally over the next few weeks a tool, Performance Max, that enables hotels to create digital ads in multiple formats to reach travelers across six of its ad channels, namely YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps.
Book on Google, which is slated to be retired, continues to be useful to the company now that Google revived a pre-pandemic test and is offering a flight price guarantee on a limited number of U.S. routes.
Expedia Group executives such as CEO Peter Kern and Chairman Barry Diller have long railed against Google’s inordinate dominance in travel advertising, but now Kern is hoping that the emergence of generative AI companies and other emerging technologies may lead to diminished dependence.
Move over Mark Zuckerberg and your metaverse vision: Travelzoo said it will be launching its own metaverse shortly.
I am back with another short video on my thoughts on AI+Travel, fourth in the series over last few months. Part 1, part 2 and part 3 are here.