Google Adds Hotel Deal And Flight Tracking Features

It’s clear that Google wants to do more than just help you figure out when to use “affect” and “effect” or find the best spaghetti bolognese recipe: in the past few years it has launched Google Flights, which lets users keep track of routes or itineraries and see how price fluctuates over time, and Google Destinations, which helps users choose where to go on their next travel. But some of the company’s latest innovations in travel are actually being inspired by something else entirely—Google’s shopping tools and data. “Mobile has become the new normal,” Jonathan Alferness, Google’s vice president of product management for shopping and travel products, told reporters at a media event in New York City this morning. “We are expecting that mobile will play a huge role in both shopping and travel.” Consider the numbers: One in three people begin a travel-related search without knowing where they want to go yet, and brands don’t factor in at this early stage—78 percent of searchers don’t have an airline preference, while 82 percent don’t have loyalty to a specific hotel. Read the full Condé Nast Traveler article here.