Google Is Killing Booking and Review Sites
For two decades, travel fare aggregators and booking sites rode roughshod over traditional travel agencies as the world moved online. Paid reviewers and classified ads, too, got shoved aside by sites like Yelp and Angie’s List. Crowdsourced opinions from the masses rendered old gatekeepers irrelevant.
But the world moves quickly, and now the TripAdvisors, Expedias, Yelps, and Angie’s Lists of the world are facing an existential threat.
The instrument of their destruction? Google.
The Internet 1.0 travel and review companies succeeded largely because they appeared first on the top of Google’s rankings. When you searched for “hotels in Honolulu,” the top results would be from sites like Priceline. When you punched in “best Mexican food in Cambridge, MA” you would see sites like Yelp.
As the 2010s got underway, Google decided that the travel and review business pie looked awfully tasty. The only reason that most people happened upon those sites was because they ranked first in Google’s search results. Why not just show hotel listings or restaurant reviews directly, cut out the middle man, and take a large piece of pie for ourselves?
That brings us to the present. Now when you Google “flight to London,” the very first thing that you see is a table of results from Google’s…
