By Steve Murch, Escapia Chairman
In 2006, I delivered a keynote presentation at the VRMA annual conference that included several predictions for the future. One of the first on the list was that Search Engines would evolve beyond serving up 10 blue links to structuring the search and delivering answers.
Bing.com, from Microsoft, went live on June 1. While it took a little longer than I predicted to get to this milestone, I believe continued structuring of the search experience is inevitable and benefits consumers, suppliers (and in turn Escapia) greatly. Bing's launch will necessitate competitive responses from Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines, and their response will in turn garner a response from Microsoft, each trying to outdo the other in helping consumers make decisions. Over a period of the next few years, this competitive dynamic will meaningfully shift the search experience on the Internet and have profound long-term impacts.
Bing.com represents the beginning of a gradual but major shift, where results can be filtered and displayed before handing off to third parties.
Here’s a commercial that gets at the change:
Let’s look at the way people search for vacation rentals today. If you’re looking for a Maui vacation rental, chances are, you’re going to start by launching your browser, and Googling “Maui vacation rental”, “Kihei vacation rental”, etc.
But here’s the thing. You’re probably very uninterested in seeing any Maui vacation rental option that won’t work for you.
This may include:
- Spots that are already booked for the dates you want to go
- Those that aren’t in your price range
- Those that don’t have any photos
- Those that aren’t in the specific neighborhood or location you want
- Those that don’t have the bedroom configuration or amenities you want
- etc.
You don’t want to waste time firing off dozens of emails to property managers asking questions, and then wading through the results. Chances are pretty good you want to narrow your search down to just those that are right for you. Should you really have to waste time wading through all those bad results to get to the one you want?
The search engine that doesn’t waste your time is the one you’ll continue to go back to.
Bill Gates has described it this way: “The future of search is in verbs, not nouns”. In other words, he’s saying that when you go to a search engine, it’s usually because you’re trying to do something. Like decide on which car is best for you. Or what to cook with leftover chicken. Or decide where to go on vacation. Or find the best vacation rental that meets your desires and constraints. Perhaps the two biggest constraints in vacation lodging decisionmaking are dates of availability and pricing. These are items that, in the professional property manager world, reside only on the backoffice system; going any other place for this information with most systems can result in an answer that is wildly wrong.
For the consumer, the pages and pages of blue links are just a means to an end.
The question Microsoft now poses is: What if that end could be more quickly surfaced for you? Don’t believe Google’s feigned indifference here. Google and Yahoo! as they exist today in 2009 will continue to change, and get closer to delivering answers and insight for those trying to make decisions.
In the lodging segment, I see this eventually evolving as search engines actually placing availability filters and structured filters right on the search page, and then (optionally or not) showing you the search results in condensed form before handing you off to third parties. You’re starting to see this with Bing Travel.
For instance, try a hotel search for Las Vegas, and here’s what you get before you even leave Bing.com:
Let’s apply that to vacation rentals.
What is required for search engines to answer the availability question right on the search page? Well, for starters, it requires accurate answers to the query posed.
Therefore, it requires that it can connect into platforms that provide availability, pricing, and amenity information. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! don’t want to be in the business of writing to multiple third party platforms or kludgy screen-scrapers to get this data – they’ll want a standard. (I think it’ll eventually evolve as an adoption of an Open Travel Alliance (OTA) or some other industry XML standard, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)
At Escapia, we’re committed to supplying that electronic pipeline, and advocating for this kind of change at the major search decision engines.
Regardless of how it happens, it’s a future that’s great for consumers and property managers alike. Onward!
