Rumour True! Google trialling meta-search in maps for hotels

Who knew that a BOOT rumour (admittedly one from a trusted source) could prove to be true. I wrote last week that I had a good but unsubstantiated story that Google was planning a launch of travel meta-search. Now we have confirmation that they are putting prices into the display of hotel results with priced links to booking engines. Not all users are seeing this functionality (in classic Google multi-variant testing) preventing me from giving you a screenshot of my own, but over at "eWeek Google Watch" you can see some screenshots of a "hotels in new york" search with prices and meta-search style functionality.

Kayak, Wego, Hotelscombined, Sprice and more - hold on to your algorithms this is going to be a bumpy ride!

More analysis over at Tnooz

PS - WOW I scored a TechCrunch link out of this

Update: Sprice launch and better Sydney search results

Did a post last week on Euro and Asian meta-search company Sprice.com and their site re-launch in Singapore and the number of hotel results appearing for Sydney.

It has been pointed out and confirmed that the search results were for Sydney Nova Scotia not Sydney Australia. In my trial search I simply types in the word "Sydney" and pressed return. Nothing on the page indicates that it is the "wrong" Sydney (apologies to any offended Canadians). Have redone the search (see shot below) and produced 4 pages of results. Apologies to Sprice for not picking this up in the post. I would still argue for Sprice improving the destination resolution so that it is much clearer which destination is being searched (again see shot below) but this is a much better position to be in. A Sprice contact mentioned on email to me that they will be working on this.

Still is a strange bit of AdSense in that the shot contains a Wego advertisement (and a Bezurk one too). I suggest Sprice add this to the list of things to update as well.

Meta-search Sprice announces revamped Singapore site - celebrates by showing only 2 hotels in Sydney

UPDATE - please see update

Sprice.com (previously called Fare.net) has been on my radar for a while because they raised some $10mm last year. However the first time I looked at their search results I did not like what I saw. There were plenty of hotels but the UI has hard to navigate and made comparison of hotel rates cumbersome and difficult. I was therefore interested to read a story on TravelMole announcing that they had revamped the Sprice.com Singaporean website. The functionality looks a lot better, is easier to navigate and has that clean & crisp travel2.0 light tones buzz about it. But (and this is a big but) on my random search for Sydney hotels check in 28 Aug Sprice.com returned only 2 hotels. As you can also see from the screenshot below the Google AdAense bar contains a strange collection of ads for US, UK and French destinations. Sprice have the UI issues fixed but need to go back to the connection and monetisation side of the business and do a lot more work.