Travel Industry

Google has enhanced the functionality of Google Maps with an exciting new tool – Place Pages for Google Maps. Each Place Page has all the relevant information – photos, videos, reviews, related websites, popular attractions, maps, directions, etc. – listed on one single page.

Place Pages for Google Maps - Snapshot

And the thing that makes it so awesome is that there is a literally a Place Page for every place in the world. You can find all the information you want about businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.

You do a search on Google Maps, and if you click on “more info” in search results, or on ”more info” in the mini-bubble, it takes you to the Place Page. The photos are powered by Panoramio, videos by youtube.

A search for Katz’s Deli in New York resulted in a page where the overview included all the usual stuff such as a menu, pricing, dining style, maps and location.

And then you have separate sections for photos & videos; user reviews from TripAdvisor, Citysearch and other sources; web pages devoted to the place; and user content such as wikipedia pages and flickr photo sets.

Place Pages for Google Maps - Snapshot

The overall impression, once you check out one of these pages, is that you don’t really need to go anywhere else. Everything you need to know about ‘the’ place is aggregated right there – on that one page.

If you’re a business owner, you can add or update your business details through Google’s Local Business Center.

As of now, cities and most businesses have their own URL under google.com/places. For example, New York is google.com/places/us/new-york/new-york-city. And San Francisco is google.com/places/us/california/san-francisco-city.

Question is, are these Place Pages going to compete in web search results? They’re not completely kept out of search results - a few queries, closely tied to the page titles, did return these pages. But as of now, the use of Place Pages looks to be limited for use with Google Maps.

Even so, given the massive reach and visitor base for Google Maps, its a virtual guarantee that Place Pages will very quickly become a go-to source for checking out restaurants and other consumer-oriented businesses where reviews matter a great deal.

Google’s mobile advertising division has started providing stellar results for the search giant’s major desktop customers like Vegas.com.

Vegas.com

Vegas.com is seeing ad click-through rates as high as 20% for their iPhone Android search ad campaign. The search ads appear alongside search results on iPhones, Palm Pre and devices running the Android operating system.

And with this mobile campaign, Vegas.com has tapped into a very high potential and lucrative market – people who are looking for Las Vegas hotels and other tourism service providers ‘after’ they land up in Vegas. These customers haven’t done any travel research, and they’re looking for last-minute bookings, which makes it an easy sell.

Scarlet Lento, Internet marketing manager at Vegas.com, tells Mediapost that click-through rates on Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating system  surpasses desktop campaigns. He adds that Vegas.com plans to keep the mobile ad campaign going for now, and since the ads met their ROI goals, they will launch more ads.

And this is not just happening or staying in Vegas. According to ComScore data, 7 million mobile browsers accessed information or services related to travel, spread across the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The US growth in mobile use for travel related info and services was a stunning 62% in 2008.

A research report by London based EyeforTravel Research on the use of mobile technology in travel explores all the issues and things that travel companies need to be aware of before they jump into a mobile ad campaign.

EyeForTravel Mobile Tech report

EyeForTravel’s Andrew Merrie tells Travel Trade that the industry is ‘cautiously excited’ about mobile technology and quite aware of the growing impact of mobile devices and the possibilities it holds to connect with customers.

He adds, however, that most travel companies are still in the dark about how to go about doing this ‘connecting’ and are unsure about where to start, which mobile platform to focus on, whether to go through the internet or use apps, and what kind of ROI to expect. 

Just so you know, there is no need to put up a separate mobile version of your site, if you’re running an iPhone Android search ad campaign like Vegas.com. It’s a question of knowing how to run an Adwords campaign, and knowing how to create a mobile ad. Here’s Google’s full mobile ads faq, which should help you get started.

And you can see the full EyeForTravel ‘Mobile Technology in Travel’ report here.

With the launch of City Tours (http://citytours.googlelabs.com/), Google adds to the list of trip-planning solutions which use some combination of local data, maps, user generated content and social networking tools.

Google City Tours

City Tours is still under Google Labs , and as such, it’s still pretty much in it’s infancy, but it’s already being touted as something with immense possibilities. City Tours points out the attractions and plans out multi-day trips. All you do is name the city and you’re good to go. And if you specify the location of your hotel and the length of your trip, City Tours will map out a complete itinerary for you.

When you type in the city name, you get back a planned 3-day trip, with around 10-12 attractions mapped out per day. The site suggests time to be spent at each location, and walking distances between the mapped attractions. You can modify the number of days, and add new attractions.

It’s pretty basic and simple, and adding new attractions seems to work, so long as you don’t try to add some name or attraction which could have other meanings. But the interesting part is in the possibilities that City Tours offers. It uses Google Maps to figure out the relative positions of the attractions in each itinerary, and line them up so as to create a suggested tour with the minimum overall amount of walking necessary.

So you could, for example, work out a complete trip plan, starting from your hotel, throw in restaurants, attractions, shows, and a complete trip, rather than just the attractions. You could make it work for a multi-day roadtrip across state lines, involving multiple destinations.

And instead of just walking between destinations, if you could plug-in Google Transit to cover the distances between the attractions, that would make it even more closer to reality. You’d get a trip plan with suggested attractions for each day of your stay, and the closest public transport options for traveling from one point to the next. That’s pretty much all you’re looking for in a trip planner.

And there are plenty of sites, like GoPlanit, which already offer something close to this. The difference with Google is the vast scale of it and the user participation - pretty soon, people will have added so many attractions to each place that the system will be bigger and better than what any other trip planning site can offer.