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Google is eating the travel industry.

Search for anything travel related and you get pages of Google products and advertising widgets before you get to the first organic result.

The change over the last 5 years is huge.

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When I first found Google flights a couple years ago it was ahead of all the other trip aggregators and unbelievably cheaper too. I think it forced the cheapo tickets craze because I had never seen $50 cross country tickets before that, and it practically destroyed all the little deals and gentlemens agreements that the other aggregators undoubtedly had.

Google Flights lack inventory (as they are powered by a GDS so anyone not filing to that GDS will be missing) and to get their incredible speed they cache and calculate prices which results in frequent pricing misses as well.

Pretty soon they'll have enough traffic nobody will be able to afford to fillng the GDS

Just looking for simple statistics and numbers on the tourism and hospitality industry is difficult on google. Every query just returns ads.

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