DOS_patos
Unverified Legion of Trill member
The internet is littered with the bodies of companies unable to adapt when Big Tech moved to offer a service for free.
Possibly the most famous example in tech history remains Microsoft’s decision in 1996 to give away its browser Internet Explorer bringing Netscape’s skyrocketing share price to an abrupt halt. The rest is history.
Although Google’s recent decision to stop charging for leads to airlines and OTAs in Google Flights might look insignificant in comparison, it is sending shockwaves across the travel industry.
To understand why, it is important to understand Google Flights’ weight in the airline distribution ecosystem.
The creation of a giant
Google planted the flag of its flight ambitions with the acquisition of ITA software back in 2010, the backbone of what would become Google Flights.
Since then, a slow but steady stream of product enhancements, combined with increasing search result visibility and a gradual integration into the rest of Google’s ecosystem (Gmail, Google Assistant etc.), has allowed the it to become a powerhouse in the airline distribution industry.
There exists no reliable industry data source to put a size to Google Flights, but comparing its worldwide brand searches in Google Trends vs. other global flight players illustrates a clear long term trend:
The chart of brand interest per region over the last 12 months shows Google Flights' dominance in the U.S. market vs. Skyscanner's stronghold in most of the other Western countries.
Comparing Google Flight with top airline brands in the US gives an order of magnitude of its unstoppable rise:
It’s important to note that Google Trends is a fairly accurate indicator of the consumer interest for a product or a brand, but not a reliable source for absolute traffic volumes
Knowing how much Google Flights represents in terms of upstream traffic for airlines tells us the story from another angle. Web analytics tool Similarweb identifies Google Flights referral traffic as “googleadservice” (separately from other Google traffic sources like Adwords and SEO categorized as “Search”, YouTube as “Social” and Google Display Network as “Display Advertising”), and ranks Flights as the top one or second referral site for many of top U.S. and European airline websites.
In stark contrast, Google Flights is missing as an important referral site among most OTAs, since it was deliberately excluding them from its core result pages (with some rare exception such as Kiwi.com, thanks to its virtual interlining).
Winds of change
Lately, Google has started to open its flight search result page to OTAs outside the U.S.
The change only seems to apply on certain airlines only but some random searches on a Spanish IP show a significant number of OTAs mixed with airline website results:
It is impossible to estimate the share of Google Flights' searches impacted by this change and the degree of traffic funneled to OTAs, but it shows that Google is reviewing its original “airline only” comparison principle.
By doing so, the tech giant is further going head-to-head with the rest of flight metasearch competitors that have historically made THEIR living from OTA referral fees.
Possibly the most famous example in tech history remains Microsoft’s decision in 1996 to give away its browser Internet Explorer bringing Netscape’s skyrocketing share price to an abrupt halt. The rest is history.
Although Google’s recent decision to stop charging for leads to airlines and OTAs in Google Flights might look insignificant in comparison, it is sending shockwaves across the travel industry.
To understand why, it is important to understand Google Flights’ weight in the airline distribution ecosystem.
The creation of a giant
Google planted the flag of its flight ambitions with the acquisition of ITA software back in 2010, the backbone of what would become Google Flights.
Since then, a slow but steady stream of product enhancements, combined with increasing search result visibility and a gradual integration into the rest of Google’s ecosystem (Gmail, Google Assistant etc.), has allowed the it to become a powerhouse in the airline distribution industry.
There exists no reliable industry data source to put a size to Google Flights, but comparing its worldwide brand searches in Google Trends vs. other global flight players illustrates a clear long term trend:
The chart of brand interest per region over the last 12 months shows Google Flights' dominance in the U.S. market vs. Skyscanner's stronghold in most of the other Western countries.
Comparing Google Flight with top airline brands in the US gives an order of magnitude of its unstoppable rise:
It’s important to note that Google Trends is a fairly accurate indicator of the consumer interest for a product or a brand, but not a reliable source for absolute traffic volumes
Knowing how much Google Flights represents in terms of upstream traffic for airlines tells us the story from another angle. Web analytics tool Similarweb identifies Google Flights referral traffic as “googleadservice” (separately from other Google traffic sources like Adwords and SEO categorized as “Search”, YouTube as “Social” and Google Display Network as “Display Advertising”), and ranks Flights as the top one or second referral site for many of top U.S. and European airline websites.
In stark contrast, Google Flights is missing as an important referral site among most OTAs, since it was deliberately excluding them from its core result pages (with some rare exception such as Kiwi.com, thanks to its virtual interlining).
Winds of change
Lately, Google has started to open its flight search result page to OTAs outside the U.S.
The change only seems to apply on certain airlines only but some random searches on a Spanish IP show a significant number of OTAs mixed with airline website results:
It is impossible to estimate the share of Google Flights' searches impacted by this change and the degree of traffic funneled to OTAs, but it shows that Google is reviewing its original “airline only” comparison principle.
By doing so, the tech giant is further going head-to-head with the rest of flight metasearch competitors that have historically made THEIR living from OTA referral fees.