Google tips

Vacation rental property manager Vacasa is eliminating 1,300 positions, which was 17 percent of its workforce, as the company determined it had to make deeper improvements to operations. The firings took place Tuesday, just three months after the company axed 280 staffers.

As other sectors deal with post-epidemic corrections, travel brands continue to grow as they make up for lost ground over the last three years. Earnings season continued this week and both Meta’s and Google’s results showed the strength of travel brands during the last quarter. Read on.

A research report found that Expedia Group has lost global hotel market share since the onset of the pandemic, and all of it has come from plunging business at non-core brands, such as Hotwire, eBookers, Orbitz and Travelocity.

The longtime business models of online travel companies ranging from Airbnb to Expedia and Booking.com are getting increased scrutiny from the media and short-term rental hosts because these companies hold onto customer funds, and invest them for profits before disbursing them, sometimes months later.

While Alphabet, Google’s parent, saw advertising revenue tick down 1.6 percent in the fourth quarter, travel and retail revenue increased.

Travel metasearch sites such as Trivago and Tripadvisor fell considerably short of pre-pandemic 2019 revenue levels in 2022 while travel companies in other sectors, such as Airbnb in short-term rentals, and tours and activities provider Viator greatly exceeded their marks from three years ago.

Tripadvisor filled in the blanks, naming two executive appointments to flesh out a reorganization of its core business that the company disclosed during its fourth quarter earnings call a week ago.

Can you imagine an easier application for generative AI than creating travel itineraries and in-destination tour plans, in particular? One way or another, Tripadvisor will have to deal with this emerging technology because it runs square into the company’s evolving turnaround strategy.

The Google pages of many hotels — including premier properties — in the Himalayan hill towns of Darjeeling and Kalimpong in West Bengal have been defaced for fraud ahead of the holiday travel rush. Anybody looking for hotels in Darjeeling using the search engine will come across prominent photographs containing the hackers’ phone numbers over a section displaying pictures of rooms and amenities. “We have been lately facing incidents where fraudsters are posting their mobile numbers with payment options to book not only our properties but also several others in the region. We are continually monitoring this and flagging all such posts as ‘spam’ for Google to review and have them removed,” said Viraj Oberoi, director of Elgin Hotels & Resorts, a luxury heritage hotels chain with properties in Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Sikkim. Cyber miscreants are removing hotel details and creating their own profiles with personal contact details, said Sandipan Ghosh, general secretary of regional travel trade body Eastern Himalayas Travel and Tour Operators’ Association. “Surprisingly, they’re also luring customers to pay in advance while knocking off the goods and services tax charge,” Ghosh said. In India, the goods and services tax on hotels range anywhere between 12-18 percent, depending on the pricing. Customers, while trying to book hotels online for Darjeeling, have been duped to pay advance amounts to bank accounts which don’t belong to the owners of the accommodations. “We’re in touch with the cyber cell department to track such incidents closely and take action accordingly,” Ghosh added. 

Booking.com does it and so do Amazon, Etsy and Alibaba, so why not Airbnb?

Google is starting to release the chatbot Bard, its rival to ChatGPT.

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.

Google released limited access to Bard, essentially its own version of ChatGPT, earlier this week. If today were six months ago, it would be more exciting. But compared to what is available today, the chatbot’s abilities are not particularly impressive. 

As travel habits change and technology gets better, Google is working to adapt its services for both companies and consumers. Finnbar Cornwall, industry sector leader for travel at Google UK, shared some points about the company’s travel efforts during the Skift Future of Lodging Forum on Wednesday.

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.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Monday, April 10. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

There has been so much coverage of generative AI at Skift over the last several months that it may have been hard to catch it all. 

A UK-based startup has secured funding and two leading advisors to help its mission evolve how companies bring their teams together.

A 2014 Skift Research report projected that “silent travelers,” namely younger consumers who turned to their mobile devices first to obtain solutions to problems, would upend the travel industry.

Google advertising, search and other revenue revenue grew 2 percent year over year in the first quarter, pushed upwards by increases in revenue from travel and retail ads.