Google Adds hotel deals, Airfare Tracking and filters to its metasearch

Source: Google adds airfare tracking, hotel deal spotting, and filters to its metasearch – Tnooz

It’s great that Google now offers more filtering options and enhancing its natural language search.

I particularity like the “Google adds hotel deals to filters” option. If I read it right, it might allow hotels to offer special rates for direct booking that are not made public. that is they may only show the actual rate when the user is signed in. This is good for hotels who want to compete with OTAs, with their direct booking strategies, and don’t want to run afoul of their Rate Parity terms.

Deals are a very persuasive display term and according to Google deals “receive about twice as many bookings as other hotels through its platform”.  It adds that deals are noted “by the search engine’s algorithms when it sees a sharp drop in a rate.”

I” check this out the Sean O’Neill and advise and clarification here

See more about Direct Booking Strategies in our last blog >>

Sean also comments on its other search related filtering saying that is new filteres “are based on more granular shopping needs, such as hotel rating or rate range, with one tap on their mobile devices. ” he also notes that metasearch engines; Kayak, Skyscanner, TripAdvisor, Momondo, and Hipmunk, have offered filters before but  Google’s  “smart filters is intriguing in the context of its plans for Google Assistant, a natural-language, conversation-based search tool that the company has shown can help with travel planning.”

We will be watching this closely. Hotel search and trip planning is still very archaic and there are many innovation coming down the tube.
We will cover them here as they unfold.