It's the end of search as we know it (and I feel fine)
Interesting article:
Over the years, online hotel bookings have increased dramatically: according to Statista, last year the market value for hotel reservation made on the web was over 42 billion in the US alone. However, the search volume on classic search engines (such as Google or Bing) for generic travel-related keywords is constantly decreasing.
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Interesting article. What would it mean for Houfy or those other big sites if travelers where booking through Google? And I wonder what Google will charge? It might not be less than the big OTAs, so as vacation rental owners we might not love this solution. Though maybe people would call you and bookdirect? Would Google be upset by that?
I posted this reply in its comments.
I am so glad I found your article. I have been making similar arguments that your data supports; search is dying for vacation rental travel as well, imstead replace by the traveler directly accessing their favorite website. Vacation Rental owners are trying to regain control of their rentals and small businesses. The big 4 have inserted fees of up to 21% without bring any additional value over the tradition subscription based fixed price advertising model on the listing sites. In the end, I believe he next winners will be new brands that are just starting, that recognize the public won't pay the middleman valueless sums, and reinstitute a subscription listing model. These new sites will also be able to integrate with the Aggregator as well as Google's own metadata search/filter/sort capabilities coming online. But the biggest question is whether google gets great and inserts a commission, or whether they will rely on placement bidding revenue from lostings within the search results.