Specialist
Former director at Google LLC
Agenda
- Travel industry paid search spend outlook
- Market share dynamics in flight and hotel metasearch
- Potential evolution of Google's travel strategy
- Travel inventory acquisition dynamics – flights and accommodation
Questions
1.
How disruptive have the last 18 months or so been for travel? What is your recovery outlook for travel and paid search within Google's travel vertical?
2.
What is travel’s importance to Google’s ads business? Is it the most significant search vertical?
3.
Do you think travel will become a smaller share of Google’s total business? When you were talking about shopping, were you alluding to the announcements in relation to Shopify?
4.
Do you expect CPMs to trend higher than their pre-pandemic averages, given the competition for returning custom? How do you think the big spenders such as Booking, Expedia, Airbnb and Hilton will approach bidding for AdWords or search terms?
5.
What do you think the auction process will be as we come out of the pandemic? It seems likely to play into the hands of the organisations that have the best conversion, such as Booking.
6.
What is the main monetisation mechanism for the auction? Is it impressions, clicks or acquisitions?
7.
Does the data that’s fed back to the industry require third-party measurement, or do suppliers typically take that at face value?
8.
Who are the leading measurement service providers to the travel industry?
9.
Is there an ecosystem that sits between the supplier and Google measuring the effectiveness of ad spend?
10.
How penetrated do you think the travel vertical is, in terms of at least the conventional monetisation avenues for Google? Do you think it is quite saturated?
11.
How do you think Google’s overall travel strategy will evolve? Will it cooperate or compete with OTAs [online travel agencies]?
12.
What will happen to Google if Booking and Expedia get more adept at driving traffic directly to apps? There are markets in APAC that are very comfortable with using apps, so presumably Google has less potential in those markets. What do you think Google would do in that situation?
13.
Can Google do more to get its apps noticed in APAC metasearch by putting them towards the top of its results? Is that too egregious for its OTA customers? Would they be too disturbed by that?
14.
Google was experimenting with buses in India. Do you think it could roll them out extensively in the region, or would that create too much friction with itsOTA customers?
15.
Where does Google normally get its metasearch inventory from? Is it from OTAs, GDSs [global distribution systems] and suppliers directly? What do you think about the inventory mix?
16.
Is Google Hotels a competing metasearch product to all intents and purposes?
17.
Can Booking use its control over the inventory as leverage to drive concessions from Google? You could argue that it drives a lot of the experience the customer has on Google by providing so much inventory to be viewed and organised. Are there dynamics like that there?
18.
Do you think Google can aggregate or acquire as much hotel or accommodation inventory as Booking? Is that realistic?
