Friday, March 24, 2006

More on the Troogle front

Graham Donoghue, one of Travolution’s occasional Star Bloggers and head new media at TUI UK, posted this response to a post earlier this week.

He raises interesting points about Google and its – consistently denied – plans for a travel portal (Troogle) along the lines of the Google Finance service launched this week.

Thought it might be worth reproducing here the results of his search on the US version of Google.

Simply type in any departure and arrival airport, a date, and the rest is very intriguing. And no wonder some are getting hot under the collar about it.

Alongside the usual sponsored links and above the natural search results is a deep-link connection for the flight and dates in question direct into Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz, Priceline or Travelocity.

Most will probably be wondering what deals have been struck to give those five sites such prominent positions; others will be equally curious as to when a similar piece of functionality will wind its way across the Atlantic Ocean to the UK and Europe.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mmmh... and just for fun, what would happen to the Big Five when Troogle will deep dive into the airlines' yield management systems.

Mmmh ? Any idea ?

Travolution Blogger said...

As Graham Donoghue suggested in his original response to Heather Hitwise's post: getting information out of Google is pretty difficult, so we suspect they will be unlikely to tell you.

Perhaps the airlines will be more forthcoming. But perhaps not...

Travolution Blogger said...

Yes, perhaps the original post was actually meant to be The Big Four, although it may have been suggsted for a reason.

First Choice, MyTravel, Thomas Cook, Thomson and ........ Troogle, maybe!

Anonymous said...

Ok I know this is getting a bit sad now, but I just had to check to see if the domain www.troogle.com was registered and it is, but no Eric Schmidt or Larry Page on the deeds...