Google gobbles up geolocation in travel

By Steve Keenan

If anyone were in any doubt over Google’s intent on owning the travel information space, along come two announcements this week. It would be no surprise if they come in threes, like buses.

The company last year committed vast resources into creating Hotel Finder and Flight Search for websites and tablets. Its maps are best in class, and Hangouts are well suited to travel chats.

Google Now puts live travel information in one place, and it has moved into the hotel and restaurant review space while buying guidebook publisher Frommer’s and integrating its information. Oh, and it owns YouTube.

All well and good. These were big land-grabbing projects, designed to put Google at the heart of travel.

But now comes the clever stuff, travel information on your smartphone. Google Now will already tell you the time of the next train, or news of a flight delay, while Google Goggles takes, say, a photo of a landmark, wine lable or painting and provides information. Or it can translate a menu.

And this week, Google expanded its Android app Field Trip (shortly to come to iOS) by adding a smorgasbord of local information and tips from Spotted by Locals, a network of travel bloggers in 46 cities in Europe and America.

The latest in Google’s evolving travel stable, Field Trip uses geolocation to run in the background and pops up information on passing landmarks or restaurants. You can choose which information you want and, using a headset, have the information read to you. Augmented reality is finally getting a bit, well, real.

Talking of real, the second Google announcement this week is the launch of Arts Talks on Google+ It’s a series of Hangouts with experts from galleries and museums, with the first from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The second is from the National Gallery in London on March 20 - and if you miss them, you can of course watch later on YouTube.

You can see how geolocation and information is a key combination in future travel planning. We already make 25% of travel searches on mobile devices, and the trend towards booking a hotel on mobile within 24 hours of arrival is well established (have you got Hotel Tonight on your phone?)

You can search for a hotel on a number of apps by location, price and information - not just reviews, but info about the area, proximity to transport, restaurants and nightlife etc.,

We begin to expect geolocation as standard - and expect more ways of bringing our travels to life with useful stuff. In an excellent article from the Mediashift Idea Lab, author JD Lasica highlights dozens of travel start-ups now based on location information.

“We’re seeing geolocation begin to splinter into niches and verticals. And, within a couple of years, geolocation capabilities will simply be baked into our everyday on-the-go lives,” he says.

As Karen Carpenter foretold in 1970, we’ve only just begun.