What is the impact of Google Trips for tours and activities

What is the impact of Google Trips for tours and activities

This week Google announced the app Trips, a new app that serves as a trip planner and travel guide for anyone who is exploring a new place.

Trips is the result of more than two years of work on improving Google’s travel products said Richard Holden, vice president of product management at Google in an interview. The company hopes that the new app will become the most well known app for travelers to organize trip information ahead of their travels and get around once they’ve arrived in the destination.

At the moment several sources confirm that only booking confirmations from flights, rental cars and hotels are pulled from travelers’ Gmail account and stored into a reservation tab within the app. In the future, we can imagine that Google will add concert tickets, events, tours and activities to this tab as well.

Booking confirmations sent by Rezdy already have the structured code that allows Google Trips to push email data into the app. So once Google implements this in the App, Rezdy customers will be the first to benefit from this feature.

In the meantime.. Tour operators should:

With Google getting more and more serious about the travel market, we think it’s only a matter of time tours and activities will get a more prominent role in the search engine. So what can you as a tour operator do to get ready for this?

Let Google know where you are

Google Trips uses information from Google Maps to show what there is to do within a destination. If you are not visible on Google Maps, you should start with letting Google know, where your business is located.

Get reviews on Google

When you download the app, you’ll see that reviews take up a lot of screen space. Google reviews also show on the search result page, so it is a no-brainer to get a few raving reviews on this platform as well.

Get a responsive booking form / booking button on your homepage

Many tour operators already have https://rezdy.com/feature/mobile-bookings/ and a clear booking button on their homepage. But for those who don’t, there is no escaping it any longer. The percentage of mobile bookings has been increasing over the years and apps like Google Trips will only further increase this trend.

Our industry is booming, and exciting!

The tours and activity industry is getting more exciting by the day. Last month TripAdvisor made it easier to book things to do from the homepage. And AirBnb acquired Spanish Trips4Real, indicating large travel websites are realizing the potential of the tours and activity industry.

Rezdy aims to connect the industry through Marketplace in order to grow the industry as a whole, making it easier for travelers around to book tours and activities around the world.