Google Takes On Tourism With City Tours Experiment
City Tours is a new addition to Google Labs that puts Google squarely in the tourism business: Give it a city name, and Google not only suggests sites to see, but it also maps out a multi-day itinerary and proposes a minute-by-minute travel schedule for you to follow.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's Maps product has been drifting toward commerce for years — the company tested local ads layered onto Maps back in January 2006 — and City Tours is the next step: a Google Labs experiment that turns the same mapping data into a finished tourism product, generating multi-day sightseeing itineraries with minute-by-minute schedules from nothing but a city name.
The launch fits a busy stretch for Labs: Google demonstrated Wave earlier in June 2009 and has a visual News browser rumored in the pipeline, making clear that Labs is where Google prototypes products that go beyond search results pages. City Tours matters because it moves Google from organizing travel information to authoring travel plans — a step directly into the territory of guidebooks and trip-planning sites.
First-order effects
- Travelers get free, instantly generated multi-day itineraries that compete with paid guidebooks and human-curated city guides from publishers like Frommer's-style incumbents.
Second-order effects
- Online travel agencies and city-guide publishers are pushed to build comparable automated itinerary tools or cede the planning stage of the trip to Google; if itineraries gain traction, the local ads model Google tested on Maps in 2006 offers an obvious monetization path by placing sponsored attractions inside generated schedules.
Third-order effects
- If the experiment graduates out of Labs, Google positions itself as the intermediary between travelers and destinations, capturing the planning layer that today belongs to guidebook publishers and OTAs — with the long-run risk for those businesses of being reduced to suppliers of bookable inventory inside Google's interface.
The trend: Search engines are evolving from pointing users at travel planning resources to generating the plans themselves, pulling the trip-planning layer in-house.