GOOGLE TRAVELS WITH ITS USERS

Google launched a new tool helping travellers to plan their future trips directly from their smartphones. This new tool, called Destinations, is an ergonomic interface pushing people to stay on Google in each step of the travel organisation.

Every day ”Destinations” the new tool summarizes the prices of thousands of billions itineraries to show flight and hotel fares which are updated every time. It enables people to compare costs among famous cities in a quick time.

Google has opened itself to the world travel with this new tool, targeting mobile users mainly. According to statistic, 60% of researches for travelling start on Google website, thus, the leader of the search engines decided to optimize its research interface of travelling and to take advantage of the “mobile-first” trend. It is a success; the number of travel researches on Google increased by 50 since last year.

How does it work?

Firstly, the mobile user has to indicate the destination wanted in the search engine and add the key words “holidays” or “destination”. The user can easily access to detailed information about the most famous destinations of a country.

The mobile user will be able to filter its research month by month in order to find the best prices according to the time through the filter “Flexible dates”. Then thanks to the filter “Discover” it will also be possible for the user to see the weather in each city all year long, the tool will suggest the user the best time in order to avoid the crowd. Thus the future consumer will be able to book its flight and accommodation through the function “Plan a trip”.  Google selects the offer fares for the next six months, up-to-date according to Google Flights and Hotel Finder data.

The new Google tool can be used as a travel guide.

“Carnet de voyages” classifies the itineraries most frequented depending on the destinations. The platform suggests places to visit based on the history of visits from the platform database or from the other internet users.

The traveller will be able to improve its researches by choosing activities to do according to its interests.

Google allows gaining time in the travel organisation, the benefit for the user is to make everything easier during the travel researches and bookings. The goal for Google is to keep the traveller on its interface so that the traveller spends less time on OTA’s. 

Oanh GIARD & Anne-Sophie SPITERI

References:

http://www.tourmag.com/Comment-Google-veut-il-se-rendre-indispensable-aux-voyageurs_a79225.html

http://images.google.fr/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fnicoo.fr%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F09%2Fgoogle-travel.png&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fnicoo.fr%2Fe-tourisme%2Fstrategie-voyage-de-google-529&h=95&w=275&tbnid=g4Hupf-DccXiYM%3A&docid=YgemlWKz-FhfeM&ei=UkcLV6qXMYf2UsXzmrgG&tbm=isch&iact=rc&uact=3&dur=1135&page=1&start=0&ndsp=25&ved=0ahUKEwiqiL3I_YXMAhUHuxQKHcW5BmcQMwgdKAAwAA