Is Google Killing Online Travel?

24.05.2024 - 15:19 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Pranavi Agarwal / Seth Borko / Sarah Kopit

Skift Research reported earlier this year that Booking and Expedia — two giants of online travel — are experiencing slower growth and greater pressure on profit margins as they face more competition from Google.

Senior Research Analyst Pranavi Agarwal joined Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit and Head of Research Seth Borko to discuss Google’s outsized role in online travel and its impact on the sector’s major players.

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Pranavi Agarwal on Google and OTAs: “The relationship between Google and the OTAs — it’s a symbiotic one. It’s a complex one. You could even say it’s a little bit abusive because Google knows that Booking, Expedia can’t stop spending ad dollars on Google because they have to. They dare not bite the hand that feeds them.”

Seth Borko on Google’s Competitive Advantage: “Google really is a black box. And having this huge data set kind of lets us sort of reverse engineer and get a peek into that black box.”

Sarah Kopit on Reliance on Google: “I think all of us in the information space would like to stop relying so much on Google, but here we are.”

Sarah Kopit: Welcome back to the Skift Travel Podcast, everybody. I’m Skift’s Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit joined, as always, by Seth Borko, Skift’s Head of Research.

So it is said that talkies killed the silent film. And for those of us of a certain age, video killed the radio star. So today on the pod, we’re asking our industry’s disruptive technological question: Is Google killing online travel? In just a few short years, Google Hotels has become the largest and most comprehensive metasearch engine in travel. But it also attracts large numbers of consumers and drives hotel bookings.

It’s obliterating the very OTAs (that) are spending billions in advertising and Google every year. So here to help us sort through this and perhaps even answer that question is Skift’s Senior Research Analyst and author of a research series into Google Travel, Pranavi Agarwal. Hi, Pranavi.

Pranavi Agarwal: Hey, thanks for having me.

Kopit: So it’s so great to have you here with us today. Probably because at its core, Google remains a fairly black box. And so I am so curious how you and Skift Research were able to get in there and actually analyze all that data.

Agarwal: So look, I like working with data and really in this kind of dawn of AI that we’re living in, things like web scraping and analysis of big data sets has really become a lot easier. So really in an effort to kind of do some really cool analysis, some kind of unique analysis, I decided to create this proprietary database by web scraping thousands of hotels — more than 20,000 hotels that are listed on Google kind of on a global