Today we started experimenting with a new feature, visible to a small portion of users, to help make that process even easier by showing specific prices for selected hotel listings.
With this feature, when you search for hotels on Google Maps you’ll be able to enter the dates you plan to stay and see real prices on selected listings. You can click on the price to see a list of advertisers who have provided pricing information for that hotel, indicated by the “Sponsored” text, and click through to reserve a room on the advertiser’s site. (Read full news).
Google has already been scraping reviews of hotels, why not add prices. Besides, you can already filter hotel listings by price in Bing!, they just don’t show the price, so Google is just playing catch-up. I’m surprised the review sites aren’t having a cow about Google integrating their reviews because you don’t need to go to the review sites already.
I do not think the public will go to Google maps to search for hotels. Everyone is looking for good deals these days and Google cannot offer them. The specialized travel websites are all-in-one shopping pages plus they have long time relation with hotels and have great technology in place to offer the best hotel deals. They have also converting traffic from satisfied customers bookmarks and massive direct navigation. On the top, they already have good maps on their websites. The Google is just trying to be the affiliate of travel industry.
What do you think?
