Google Making a Travel Company?

How about this? Travel.google.com? According to blogger at CNET, Elanor Mills here:

Google Travel?

Is Google building a travel portal? That’s the conclusion of a ZDNet story (ZDNet is owned by CNET, parent company of News.com).

Google has posted a job opening for a senior account executive for a travel vertical based in Chicago on the job listings site of Mediabistro. “Your main responsibility is to drive new business revenue growth with our Fortune 1,000 advertisers in a specified vertical in one or more regions,” the ad says.

The article suggests that online travel site Orbitz, based in Chicago, could be the online travel agency partner for Google.

Robert Peck, an analyst at Bear Stearns, came to similar conclusions in a research note released Monday. “The position, located in Chicago, may involve partnering with one of the large OTAs (Online Travel Agencies). Orbitz (also in Chicago) would make sense due to Ask Jeeves’ relationship with Expedia, and Travelocity’s relationship with Yahoo,” he wrote. “We would presume that Google is not looking to build its own OTA, but the combination of Google’s traffic + inventory from an existing OTA could put pressure on the rest of the OTA industry.”

A partnership would be interesting, and there certainly is plenty of room in the industry for competition. This move will likely close the gap with Yahoo’s travel portal, and maybe Google can use some of their ingenuity to make online travel booking better.

But be prepared for more travel ads associated with Google searches. I hope it doesnt detract too much from the Google web searching functionality, but only time will tell.