Google Will No Longer Be a Place to Book Travel as Fewer Travelers Were Using It (2024)
Google announced it will shut Book on Google for flights for users outside the U.S. at the end of September, and told Skift it will likewise end the feature in the U.S. sometime after March 31.
It turns out, a declining number of users were booking their flights on Google, which acknowledged that travelers would rather book their flights with online travel agencies or directly with airlines.
To be clear, Google Flights is not shutting down, but will continue to enable travelers to click on airline and online travel agency links to book their flights, as they have done for years for the vast majority of flights. What changes is that Google will no longer take a small share of bookings on Google channels, but will refer all users to partners for bookings.
Eliminating the feature likewise doesn’t hurt Google’s case to beat back regulatory efforts to diminish its power on antitrust grounds.
With the Book on Google feature for flights, travelers can book on Google, but Google was just facilitating the booking for that airline or online travel agency, and the latter provided the customer service function. Google wasn’t charging airlines for the feature.
“Over the next 12 months, we plan to phase out theBook on Google feature for Flights,” Google stated. “We originally offered this functionality to give people a simpler way to buy their tickets and to help our partner airlines and OTAs receive more bookings. However, we’ve found over time that people actually want to book directly on partner websites, and we always strive to meet user preferences whenever possible.”
Some pundits saw Book on Google as the company creeping toward becoming an online travel agency, but that never appeared to be the intent. Google makes too much money on travel advertising to want to directly compete with its biggest partners. Google also has no interest in dealing with flight changes and cancellations, or in providing customer service to stranded travelers.
Google launched Book on Google in 2015 as a way to facilitate bookings for airlines and online travel agencies in an era when many of their mobile websites weren’t particularly sophisticated.
But partners’ mobile capabilities have improved in the interim, and Google said it saw a declining share of flight bookings coming from the Book on Google feature.
Many metasearch sites over the years have tried these types of facilitated bookings for partner airlines and hotels, but with a few exceptions, such as HomeToGo in Germany, this type of feature has been waning for years.
If you still can't find your trip, it could be due to one of these reasons: You deleted your trip or reservation: When you manually delete a trip or reservation, it no longer shows up on google.com/travel. You deleted the email that had the reservation associated with it.
Google Will No Longer Be a Place to Book Travel as Fewer Travelers Were Using It. Google announced it will shut Book on Google for flights for users outside the U.S. at the end of September, and told Skift it will likewise end the feature in the U.S. sometime after March 31.
Google Travel allows users to plan for upcoming trips with summarizing info about the user's destination in several categories such as day plans, reservations, and things to do.
Google made the decision to discontinue this itinerary collection feature in Google Travel sometime in 2022. Google was able to collect travelers reservations by mining Gmail, which Google owns, for flight and hotel confirmations, for example.
While booking your flight on a Sunday helps you get the lowest price, actually flying on a Thursday may help you save an average of 16 percent off airfare. Data shows that, almost across the board, travelers who flew on Thursdays instead of Sunday saved this much on both domestic and international flights.
The program used data from a number of sources, including as Gmail and Google Maps, to give consumers a thorough vacation planning experience. Google made the decision to stop developing the standalone Google Trips app in August 2019 and instead integrate its features into Google Search and Google Maps.
Google will stop offering the option to book a flight directly through the site after Sept.30 for most of the world. The search engine will then similarly end the option in the United States after March 31, 2023, the company confirmed to Travel + Leisure.
In most cases, the answer is yes, especially now that they offer a price guarantee on several flights per search. However, going directly through the airline or an online travel agency can be more effective for finding discounts or redeeming loyalty rewards to save money.
We last reported that travel apps had made a big bounce back in 2021 and can now share that, according to Adjust data, they've since reached heights well above pre-pandemic levels, with the 2023 average so far 18% above the Q4 2019 average.
Southwest didn't list its fares for sale through Google or almost any other site by design: It didn't want to put loyalty in the hands of an intermediary. Previously, the only option to book Southwest flights was directly on the airline's website or app.
Expedia doesn't display Southwest flights at all. For example, in a search of nonstop flights between Denver and San Francisco departing in March 2023, Expedia displays only United Airlines and Frontier Airlines, even though Southwest also operates that route.
Southwest doesn't allow other websites to display its airfares. “Southwest Airlines has a unique and customer-friendly business model in the United States which includes making our fares available to the general public only on Southwest.com,” Southwest spokesperson Tiffany Valdez said in an email to NerdWallet.
Furthermore, existing customers no longer received support. Their decision wasn't much of a surprise. All the app's features had already been added to either Google Maps or the Search service. Saved data remained available in the two tools, provided that users logged into their Google accounts.
Introduction: My name is Nicola Considine CPA, I am a determined, witty, powerful, brainy, open, smiling, proud person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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