BUSINESS NEWS
Google’s growth trumps rival travel giants’ Percentage point change in share prices since the start of the year
Alphabet (Google): +26%
Booking Holdings: +7% Expedia Group: -13%
TripAdvisor: -41%
January 2019
November 2019
Source: Bloomberg
OTAs strive to reduce dependence on Google
Search giant dominates Phocuswright Conference. By Lee Hayhurst in Florida
Te growing impact of search giant Google on the travel industry dominated debate at this year’s Phocuswright conference. One of the largest annual gatherings
of travel bosses, the event heard from leaders of some of the world’s biggest travel brands including
Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor. This year’s event came after
poor quarterly trading updates from Expedia and TripAdvisor, whose chief executives blamed Google’s increasing dominance in search results. With
Booking.com included,
96 28 NOVEMBER 2019
the three global travel giants lost $13 billion of their value, TripAdvisor shares seeing the biggest quarterly fall in two years and Expedia’s in 14 years. PhocusWright saw speaker after
speaker highlight Google’s growing threat, but Opodo parent eDreams Odigeo issued the most direct warning and predicted regulation of Google was coming in Europe and the US. Describing the search engine as
the “elephant in the room”, Guillaume Teissonnière, general counsel of Europe’s largest OTA, accused it of skewing the market, changing
customer behaviour and stifling competition and innovation (full story, page 94). Steve Hafner, chief executive of
Booking Holdings-owned flights metasearch site Kayak, said: “If you were getting a lot of free traffic from Google, that’s going to go away.” He said firms that are overly
reliant on search need to review their strategies, saying he was surprised they “didn’t see this train coming”.
Continued on page 94
travelweekly.co.uk
BUSINESS NEWS
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