Google released their latest labs project called “City Tours” last week. I was quick to jump on the bandwagon and take a look, but I resisted from posting right away because I wanted to think a little more deeply about the implications of the application. Let’s not forget that Google is a powerhouse and, if they wanted to, develop and release ANY travel application they want in any vertical. With a single mouse click they could probably brush Kayak, Fly.com, Bing.com, or anyone else off the on-line travel landscape. Google could have developed a meta-search engine for flights, a hotel comparison application, a packaging engine, or even a review aggregation engine, but they didn’t. Instead, Google focused on local points of interest and in-destination activities and attractions using their wildly popular Google Maps API.
Why City Tours is important to tourism
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
In my opinion, Google has focused on the right target. This may seem small but think about the data set required to produce City Tours. They have combined their Google Local Search and business listings from partner directories, geo-tagged the data (presumably with street name data and their API), and then mapped them along with suggested itineraries for major cities all around the World. City Tours is totally in line with Google’s mission. The interface seems simple enough and the features are limited at the moment, but the potential impact on in-destination tourism is massive. Think about all the local businesses like guided city tours, tour guides, bike tours, and the like that can (and will) jump in and add their information to Google Local Search so they get listed. But developing City Tours, Google stands to add hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of new data points to their index. Imagine what can be done with that data through various devices.
The Google Revenue Model
Google obviously hasn’t disclosed their revenue model for City Tours, but given their history, it is not unlikely that it will come from sponsored listings. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they sell sponsored listings within the application itself so that suggested itineraries have a set of sponsored businesses at the top of the list. In Vancouver, for example, that might be the big attractions like Grouse Mountain, Capilano Suspension Bridge, and the Vancouver Aquarium. All the other listings would be organic listings based on proximity to the sponsored ones. This is all speculation, but hopefully you can begin to see the opportunity for small business in this space. In very short order, Google has brought location based services on mobile devices one step closer to reality by connecting the critical data and the technology together in a relatively open way.
The Future for Destinations
DMOs (Destination Marketing Organizations) all over the World should be taking a very close look at what Google is doing. Google has just saved many organizations a lot of work (and money) in developing and aggregating the technology together for use by local tourism businesses. Instead of trying to develop totally separate directories and business listings, they should be aggregating this data and feeding it to Google for the purposes of creating richer, more interesting, and more relevant tour experiences. PhoCusWright research has shown that a majority of travel searching begins with Google, so why not make the results more relevant for travelers.
The Future of Booking
If you follow my work, you are probably aware that I am a believer in the four stages of the travel purchasing process (DREAM-PLAN-GO-SHARE). Trip planning sites like TravelMuse.com, Uptake.com, PlanetEye.com, and others have been very good at taking care of the DREAM-PLAN steps. Sites like Expedia.com and Travelocity.com (and many many others) focus on the GO or booking part. Site like Flickr, Youtube, Bootsnall, WorldNomads, and other social sites take care of the SHARE part. Google can begin to bring these disparate pieces together in a way that many others cannot. Currently the map detail provides the name of the attraction, the recommended time to spend at the location, the star rating and the hours of operation. Imagine the details including a short description, integration with Flickr or Panoramio for photos, contact details (phone number), and a BOOK NOW button. Now imagine that detail available on your iPhone so that when City Tours recommends the attraction, you can book tickets in advance so you don’t have to wait in line. For many tour operators this would be a dream come true especially if they are able to drive direct bookings to their own tour or activity booking website instead of having the sale go through an intermediary.
For now it is a bit early to tell what Google will do with City Tours. As a strong proponent and developer of on-line tools and reservation systems for small tourism businesses, this is a great first step. With Google shining a very bright light on local businesses, specifically destination tours and activities, I hope that small operators will begin to realize that they have an impact on tourism and that the travel community (and others) will begin to realize the potential of the tour and activity segment that, for a long time, has been largely ignored.
I'm Stephen Joyce. I'm an entrepreneur and I enjoy public speaking, writing, learning new things, sharing things I've learned with others, and hopefully making the World just a little better. This is my personal site and the views are my own.
Very nice post Stephen. More great thoughts on Google City Tours.
I know a lot of our readers and members in the tourism industry see this latest lab innovation as just cool or neat, but I, like you, get the feeling that we are seeing the start of something bigger.
Of course, it is always difficult to tell when we are looking at a potential shift in online behavior…especially in the 'beta' stage…but the possibilities available with this type of offering (many of which you touch upon brilliantly) are all right there, right on the cusp of being pulled together into a single point.
You and I both know that this level of integration or packaging (call it what you like) is not a matter of if, but when.
And this could be the start of 'when.'
Good stuff.
- Troy
PS. If this, in fact not the start of the so-called 'when' period, I reserve full rights to deny this comment ever existed.
This is a product that will jump start the Google Business Center database (http://www.google.com/local/add/). With the analytics Google offers as a part of that platform, DMOs can even enter things to do and see and have the ability to actually track how popular those destinations are.
Among all the search engine, google is Known as King. Google provides all type of answer and fulfill users requirement. By the time of travel user can see through google map that where they travel now, future which destination will best for visit. Communication of road by air, train and bus, all the problem can solve by google. So google City Tours is Important for Tourism.
Palace on wheels Taj Mahal Tour India Temple Tour
Top article Stephen,
I think this represents an enormous opportunity for a number of travel organisations. Outside of tour companies ( particularly those doing Urban adventures) and activity / itinerary sites (Viator.com, Nileguide.com / TripIt.com etc), there's also opportunity for digital content providers who offer walking tour podcasts, running guides, the list goes on.
Integration of video content would be good and will no doubt turn up and what would a maps mash app be without 'build your own walking tours' shared throughout the social sphere.
I'll stops salivating over the computer now….
Stephen and all –
just as I agree with you on the importance of this initiative for local tourism, I have a different reading.
The technology to build itineraries in Maps, as used for Google City Tours, has existed for years. (We have been toying with it since the launch of isango.com, just to park it because of the sheer amount of manual work involved into constantly updating the itineraries with every product changes from the local suppliers. But it is indeed very cool.)
So in my opinion this launch does not, for once, represent any new R&D or sophisticated technical initiative from Google. Instead, this is a major marketing initiative with 2 aspects: 1. put a focused vertical brand on top of Maps; 2. aggregate local UGC data where there is no other incumbent aggregator. The end goal being, of course, attracting more targeted traffic to entice travel advertisers.
@danbec – the technical innovation here is automating the “manual work” that isango or us or anyone else would need to do to collect this information. As Stephen correctly points out, Google is sitting on so much data anything they do is potentially a game-changer.
I see CityTours eventually posing a serious threat to Yelp.com. Imagine being able to create your own themed city tours, something like a Chocolate Tour of San Francisco. Using the tags and ratings similar to Yelp, you can plot your individual tour.
Wow, thanks for the feedback everyone. The biggest take-away is that out of everything that Google could have done, they chose to focus on attractions & activities at the destination level. For small suppliers, aggregators like isango.com, and technology companies like Rezgo, it signals a shift in thinking and focus from travel commodities to experiences. For me, Google just validated the tour & activity market and that's important.
Anyone who has tried to make sense of the wealth of information available in the travel space knows that it takes infrastructure of the scale of Google to deliver such a simple application. You can appreciate the complexities of itinerary planning by trying some foreign cities on Google City Tours and realizing the data points may not be your first choice. The next step is to find reliable ways to identify those experiences, activities, landmarks that will truly create a tour everyone would want to join. At PlanetEye our focus continues to be on identifying reliable sources of information and it seems that layer of quality may be what City Tours will soon need.
Dear Joan,
My first search was “Madrid” and this was the result:
Hanania Museum S.l. (Hanania Museum S.l.)
09:05, for 60 minutes
walk about 5 minutes
Vincci Centrum Hotel (Vincci Centrum Hotel)
10:10, for 60 minutes
walk about 7 minutes
The Westin Palace, Madrid (The Westin Palace, Madrid)
11:17, for 60 minutes
walk about 8 minutes
Museo del Ejército (Military Museum) (Museo del Ejército (Military Museum))
12:25, for 60 minutes
walk about 4 minutes
Museo Naval Madrid (Museo Naval Madrid)
13:29, for 60 minutes
walk about 14 minutes
De Las Letras H&R – A member of Design Hotels (Hotel De Las Letras)
14:43, for 60 minutes
walk about 12 minutes
Hotel Petit Palace Puerta del Sol – Sun Square (Hotel Petit Palace Puerta del Sol – Sun Square)
15:55, for 60 minutes
walk about 3 minutes
Are hotels so important to visit in madrid? I think it needs a little mor development
Great blog and thoughtful posts. I'll need to follow on Twitter.
Regarding what Google is up to, that's never clear. Most of the time I think they're just playing around with mashups to see what sticks. Sometimes nothing does (remember Google Base and Froogle?) But I agree there could be some deeper strategic play here around the local advertiser market. By focusing on the travel angle they'll be able to capture the subset of the market that's interested in the inbound visitor, something the Yellow pages directories don't address very well. It's something we've noticed at Cost2Drive and so are building a product to address as well.
With all of this new technology, it is difficult to tell where this is all going. More importantly, Google always seems to be one step ahead.