Google and the Future of Travel

An anonymous reader writes "It's been one year since Google's $700 million acquisition of ITA Software was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice after an antitrust review. So what does the search giant's strategy in online travel look like now? Google's Flight Search and Hotel Finder tools have met with mixed reviews in recent months, but a new bit of analysis argues that the future of travel is not about search, it's about data. More specifically, Google wants to make available everything from airfares and restaurant reviews to maps and transit schedules, throughout the entire travel process. And it wants to use travelers' online behavior to serve up better targeted ads and content across all of Google's sites and services."

Comments

How it feels to be targeted all the time

[TechNY]

I live in a part of world that has little limits on how you can advertise, sell your services and that has large structures for commissions regarding, well, pretty much anything. Want to take a ride somewhere? The driver will try to sell you anything. Instead of taking you where you want to go, or what is the best place for what you want to do, he will take you where he will get commissions from anything you spend. Be that restaurant or any other venue of entertainment. You can't ever be without thinking if you get good service, or if you are just used for making money. It starts to get into your head.

For me, Google is largely the same. That is how they make money. I much more happily pay for a piece of software or service when I know exactly what I get, and that I get it good price without foul play. Google and other marketers twist this. Nobody has time to completely research or get to know what they buy or what's available. Those marketers rely on that weakness, and in turn you are getting screwed. Do you really want to be thinking all the time if someone is screwing you over? It sucks.

Re:How it feels to be targeted all the time

[ygslash]

...Instead of taking you where you want to go, or what is the best place for what you want to do, he will take you where he will get commissions from anything you spend... For me, Google is largely the same. That is how they make money.

No, I don't think the people at Google are that stupid. They make their advertising money by being the biggest in search, and the only way they'll stay the biggest is by continuing to give the best results. It really doesn't make sense for them to squander their advantage for the few extra pennies they might get by skewing. And they know that very well.

Google's business model is built on the assumption that the days of traditional Big Media are numbered. The way people get information is changed forever. Now you make money by being better at gathering information and making it available, not by "owning" information and selling it.

But Big Media is not dead yet, and they are fighting back. They are using what's left of their hold on the public's attention to attack Google, and the concept of a free Internet in general, in every way they can. The amount of blatantly distorted anti-Google articles in traditional news media and on their web sites lately is astounding.

Don't get me wrong. The old slogan of "do no evil" is impossible to sustain for a for-profit company as big as Google has become. They'll do whatever they can to be the *only* ones who can present information as well as they do. They'll push the bounds of privacy, as long as it doesn't risk causing their basic business model to be clamped down.

But don't be fooled by Big Media into thinking that they'll be stupid and destroy their own business model.

Re:How it feels to be targeted all the time

[vought]

This is why Google's efforts lately have been received relatively poorly. People know that Google sees them as marks. There is no free lunch, and Google's products lately show a distinct lack of polish and execution needed to make it a one-stop-shop for "categorizing the world's information". People know Google is looking over their shoulders constantly, and their products aren't getting better fast enough to keep ahead of the free/utility versus 'leave me alone' curve for some.

When you are getting something useful for free, that's great. But the value for Google doesn't extend to actually creating consumer-driven, best-in-class products. It's obvious to a growing umber of people that Google's products for consumers exist solely to create value for the company by gathering, manipulating, and selling their behavioral habits

See G+(is that an echo in here?) or Google TV, which last I heard, might have shipped a few hundred thlusand units. See anything they've done in the consumer space over the past few years - it sucks and no one is using it.

Android - a product Google has to pay other companies for because if all the IP conflicts and agreements - is successful but looks to have some pretty big and increasingly worrisome problems with forking. Google could lose control of it. And more Android users I talk to are pissed - I mean pissed - that Apple supports a three-year old phone with the latest iOs, but Google doesn't give a ahit enough to work with carriers to make that experience more valuable - to the customer.

Read the article about Stanford's coziness with Valley companies to get some ideas why this brain rot is pissing actual customers off. Hint: MBAs and lots of smart kids who are pretty cocky have a lot to do with it.

Re:How it feels to be targeted all the time

[TheRaven64]

Android users I talk to are pissed - I mean pissed - that Apple supports a three-year old phone with the latest iOs, but Google doesn't give a ahit enough to work with carriers to make that experience more valuable - to the customer

It's nothing to do with the carriers, it's to do with the handset makers. It's also largely the fault of Google for some poor design in Android. With an iPhone, there is no artificial distinction between flash that can be used for the OS and flash that can be used for everything else. If iOS becomes 100MB bigger, it just means 100MB less for the user. If Android becomes 100MB bigger it means a load of phones stop being able to run it. My phone is about two years old, and the latest official release the manufacturer supports is 2.2 (from about when the phone was launched), although they unofficially support 2.3 (from about six months later). CyanogenMod supports a slightly newer 2.3 release.

It looks like I will be able to run a 4.x-based CyanogenMod, but that's totally unsupported by the manufacturer. They could fit 4.0 on it themselves, but they'd need to remove some of their own customisation (HTC Sense, which is quite nice, but not really essential), and they'd have to actually care about long-term support.

Re:How it feels to be targeted all the time

[AmiMoJo]

Google puts ads along side the search results and clearly separated from them. In other words they still give you impartial search results* and you can just ignore the ads if you choose.

* Except where they have been forced not to, e.g. DMCA take-down notices and the like.

big is bad

[ozduo]

I stopped using Lonely planet for travel advice because everything they suggested was congested with other Lonely planet users.

Re:big is bad

[erice]

I stopped using Lonely planet for travel advice because everything they suggested was congested with other Lonely planet users.

I think your problem isn't LP. The problem is that you keep going the same places that everybody else goes. There is no "Lonely Planet Effect" is Madagascar.

Re:big is bad

[itsthebin]

There is no "Lonely Planet Effect" is Madagascar.

I have see a lot of backpackers in the last year here in Tamatave - Google maps/earth lists many of the hotels and restaurants

Information, ads, more information, more add . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

How to I determine if any of all this gargantuan amount of information is any good? Are they real reviews, from real people . . . ? Or thinly veiled spam . . . ?

I don't need any more information. I just want to get from point A to point B at a reasonable price with the minimal amount of hassle.

My parents used to have a thing called a "travel agent" who would do that for them. She knew may parents likes and dislikes, so one short call was enough to book a trip.

Maybe someone could patent that idea, and then implement it in software?

Please note the development order. Patent first, implement later.

wtb: cheapest flight anytime

[krups gusto]

this is an area where there's a market that I was really hoping google would bust into. All I want when booking a vacation is: - What's the cheapest flight to X. I don't care when or what carrier. This functionality used to exist. Then it disappeared. I never understood why. This was a killer feature on a variety of vacation sites. If they want to blow my mind, I'd cream my pants at: - Ability to search for cheapest flight anytime including taxes/fees and assuming one carry on bag. I'd even be willing to accept a 30s must watch video add with flashing lights if the above were offered.

Re:wtb: cheapest flight anytime

[bickerdyke]

I'm all in favor of adequate prices for higher service.

But again - if you're crammed into those 28 inches on every flight and food tastes like cardboard no matter what airline I'm choosing - price again becomes the criteria.

Re:wtb: cheapest flight anytime

[flonker]

Chicago, IL -> Orlando, FL 2 weeks from today:
Greyhound.com: $134
Kayak.com: $122

I'm sure the numbers aren't what would appear on your final receipt, but the point is, The airlines are cost competitive with Greyhound, even ignoring the additional trip time and INS "papers please" inspections in Orlando that I keep hearing about from multiple people.

Re:wtb: cheapest flight anytime

[Caratted]

I hear this argument a lot on these types of threads. I'm curious as to why you think the value of the still-empty seat is 0. There is still the opportunity cost of letting you have a seat now, as opposed to being pretty confident (with their big-budget analysts, the margin of error is probably quite low) that you will book a different over-priced seat ahead of time like everybody else. I realize the fuel is still being used, but that is not how a bottom-line works.

Basically, I'm under the impression that the empty seat is still worth a significant amount on the chance (which is, statistically, very high) that you will pay more than double a marginal rate on the next, or the next, or the next available flight. Only when flights start to have routinely empty seats, does the value of those seats go to 0. And then the analysts will pull data to adjust flights accordingly. This is not a lose-lose situation for the airliners, just the consumer.

Advertizers aren't understanding

[Grayhand]

The more I get targeted and harassed the less likely I am to buy. I'm sick to death of being force fed advertisements that are "targeted" to me. I thoroughly understand the need for ads but the more oppressive the ads the more unlikely I am to buy so it's counterproductive. The fantasy of "forcing" people to buy is a fantasy so they need to back off the ads that attack customers and try to politely "inform" customers. Beating a customer senseless isn't going to make them more likely to buy their product!!!! I often feel like I'm in the movie "A Clockwork Orange"where they demand I watch their ads so I end up with a negative impression of their product.

Re:Advertizers aren't understanding

[AmiMoJo]

Who are "they"? Google's text ads don't seem anything like what you describe.

Mobile data when travelling

[AmiMoJo]

This kind of data would be so much more useful if I actually had access to it when I'm overseas, but mobile data charges make that far too expensive to contemplate. I tried Boingo and Fon but coverage for both is terrible.

Re:Mobile data when travelling

[stoolpigeon]

Right now the best bet is just to pick up a sim with data in each country. I am hoping sooner or later will see international sim cards with decent rates. It's frustrating when I get in my car, drive for 2 hours and lose my data because I just crossed the border.

I've seen some o.k. smart phones that are dual sim. I'd really like to see that feature in a higher end model. Then you can always keep in your 'home' sim and switch out as needed when you are traveling on the other slot. Google Voice needs to go international too - that would really solve the dual sim stupidity immediately.

Which, following this rabbit trail, leads to my biggest reservation about google knowing where I am. Way too many things they release are only available to users in certain countries (often just the US) and I depend on them not knowing where I am to use some of their stuff I really like. Our legal systems lag so far behind our technology and it's frustrating at times.

Re:What is ITA Software?

[Mr.Ned]

Airfare search is hard. Really hard. The guy most responsible for ITA's (now Google's) flight search engine wrote up a presentation:

http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/img0.html

See in particular "Some complexity results": http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/img24.html

Have you even tried it?

[brunes69]

What you are describing is one of the main features of Google flight search (the quick-scroll lowest fare bar chart).

You posting this makes me think you have not even looked at it at all.

Re:What is ITA Software?

[brunes69]

Airline search is actually a very complicated problem. You have a variety of complex things working in tandem

- The fact that between any two hubs you have a very large number of possible routes when you include non-direct flights. This by itself is already a non-trivial shortest-path problem.

- The fact that flight prices change multiple times daily and thus your engine and its indicies have to be fully dynamic, thus making them harder to optimize for real time queries.

- The fact that you must weigh flights on the same carrier higher than flights that are cross-carrier in your algorithms, and for cross-carrier flights allow for a longer lagtime between flights.

- The fact that certain airports need you to allow for longer lagtimes than others due to gate travel time than others, and maintain this database based on statistics

- The sheer volume of data and queries

Re:What is ITA Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually worked on an air fare search engine similar to ITA's and let me tell you - the industry is based on a 50-year old paradigm and 40-year old companies with their 30-year old traditions and procedures. Everything is meant to be easily filed on paper or dumb forms manually by people who are qualified to do just that. It is NOT meant to be easy to use or search through. There are no flights, really. It's rules upon rules upon rules upon rules. To get data on a single flight you need to query like 3 different international authorities. And even then a single flight that the user sees as a single price point looks like "If flying with company A from zone C to zone X on Wednesday or Thursday and you have a sopover in city Z for no less than 4 hours and your return flight is within 7 days, but not on a Saturday, then your price is $270 (without airport and fuel fees, which are calculated separately in a similar way), UNLESS you're accompanied by one or two minors in which case..." (I'm not making this up - in fact I'm simplifying it by an order of magnitude). And you have gigabytes upon gigabytes of text-based rules like that. And that's for a single airline. Heaven forbid if you try to combine a low cost fare with a regular one. Combining all possibilities and searching through that junk seemed to be at least NP :)
So I sincerely hope that Google can kick some major butt and reorganize the airfare industry as a whole (not just searching), because it's ridiculous that airlines need to buy 3rd party software to figure out what their own damn fares cost after all the math and taxes.

Re:What is ITA Software?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's also the issue that if you use some trivial metrics to sort your search results, you will probably obtain a dozen flight schedules that are only trivially different. It's difficult to translate any human definition of "search result usefulness" into numbers.

- The fact that flight prices change multiple times daily and thus your engine and its indicies have to be fully dynamic, thus making them harder to optimize for real time queries.

I believe they do this by staging upgrades of code and data in a cluster of nodes. You rebuild the data file (a serialized graph data structure ready to be mmap()ped), upload it onto nodes that are down and bring them up; once you have enough of them, you redirect the queries and upgrade the rest.