Google’s new travel booking tools take pandemic into account

(Bloomberg) — Since the 1990s, there’s been a dominant way to plan trips: search for flights online, match desired destinations, add a hotel, and voila.
The Covid-19 pandemic has upended this long-standing status quo. Even for those undeterred by public health concerns, flights are limited, thanks to border closures that change from week to week. Airlines take dispersed approaches to ensure safety. Hotels require a thorough check to ensure they are open and taking appropriate precautions. Even planning a road trip can be exhausting once you start factoring in state-by-state checkpoints and quarantine regulations.
Enter Google, which on Thursday launched a suite of new booking features for its flight, hotel and travel search tools to help unravel the changing rules of travel amid a pandemic. Type Los Angeles into one of these booking engines and, in addition to the usual options, you will also get real-time data on the number of Covid-19 cases there as well as the number of flights and hotels who resumed service. No other major travel provider currently displays this level of detail.
More common among its competitors, but new to Google, filters for accommodations that offer free cancellation policies, alongside other information such as government-issued travel advisories that had quietly rolled out to the start of the pandemic.
“The #1 question we get is, can we travel safely? And we’ve tried to fix that by including advisory updates in travel searches,” says Richard Holden, vice president of product management for Google’s travel arm. “The next question is where? And when I decide to emerge, what will be operational?
The answers depend as much on a person’s risk of exposure at home as on the risk in the desired destination. Google believes it has the data to help consumers make informed decisions.
When you search for, say, hotels in Rome, Google already tells you that a travel warning is in place, as does Expedia, Kayak, and several other travel sites. (Kayak’s travel advisory tool is the most comprehensive, with detailed national policies visible at a glance on a color-coded world map.) Google is now getting more accurate by customizing its data to suit your point of origin. research, for example, will report that Italy’s borders remain closed to Americans; a resident of Milan, on the other hand, would not see such a restriction.
The tools are also useful for domestic tourism, especially for US residents, whose pandemic picture changes from state to state. As part of the new features, a travel search to Denver will allow you to easily see that 63% of flights are operational there, as well as 88% of hotels; clicking on “local cases” offers an overview of the city’s currently low Covid-19 transmission rates. In Miami, still reeling, 39% of flights are in service and 65% of hotels are open for business.
Holden says lower percentages of hotels reopened or flights resumed indicate the travel industry, from hoteliers to airline executives, is still treading cautiously in this market. Higher percentages may be a sign that a destination is further along in terms of reopening.
“In a vacuum, this information alone might not mean much, but in context it can help,” says Holden. And because Google has so many entities, that context can be robust; people using Google Maps to plan road trips will now find information about Covid-19 checkpoints along their routes, for example.
Some basic things still need fleshing out. Google’s links to travel advisories are national rather than state-specific, which means the usefulness of the information depends on the country you’re looking for and can vary widely. Responsible travelers should always research local testing and quarantine requirements.
And, while knowing the percentage of operational hotels helps, it does not distinguish which of these available options is best equipped to provide a safe stay.
This could be the next step. “We thought about adding amenities checklists that talk about Covid-19 safety protocols,” says Holden. “Hotels are very interested in sharing this information, and we look forward to sharing it.”
Holden isn’t as bearish on the travel industry as Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, who thinks the industry has changed permanently. But in the medium to long term, he says the pandemic will force travelers to ask different questions before they go.
“Granted, we hope some of these features will be short-lived,” he says. But he sees his colleagues in Europe as an indication of what is to come. “My team in Zurich travels more, markets are more open and people feel freer,” says Holden. But they are not quite back to normal. “The anxiety is still there,” he says, “but it’s lessened.”
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