How Did We Allow This to Happen? Viator's Founder Rod Cuthbert on the Rise of Google – WIT
As Google continues to roll out AI-powered search features, which will undoubtedly increase its dominance in travel, Rod Cuthbert, the founder of Viator and generally acknowledged as the “Godfather of tours and activities”, got quite indignant during his session at WiT Japan & North Asia in Tokyo on Tuesday.
“How did we – the OTAs – allow this to happen?” he asked during his one-on-one interview, which followed right after a presentation by Yu Ukai, product manager at Google Travel, responsible for the travel search experience on Google Search and Google Maps, leveraging Google’s AI and other technologies.
Said Cuthbert, “We were the ones who were out there with the risk capital doing the development, figuring out how to do this. Everybody else followed along, right? We spent absolute fortunes with Google. We spent billions and billions of dollars. And now they come along and they say, you know what? We don’t really need you. Man, that drives me crazy. And it also says to me, don’t invest in anything because Google will probably take that. Take it direct.”
Image Credit WIT – Rod Cuthbert “We spent absolute fortunes with Google. We spent billions and billions of billions of dollars. And now they come along and they say, you know what? We don’t really need you.”
He reiterated that with Google’s increasing control and the potential for a ‘super app’ powered by AI, the future of online travel intermediaries remains highly uncertain, posing existential challenges to their business models.
“We see in China, there’s a super app. So, imagine a super app that’s owned by Google that’s got AI inside it. You see all the things they’re doing. If you’re an intermediary in travel, your future is so uncertain.”
He said this was the reason why the giant travel companies are building moats through mobile apps to protect themselves from the dominance of tech giants. “Half of their traffic comes from their app, which protects them. It builds another moat around them.”
What he’s happy about though is how the tours and activities sector has “become a thing”, nearly 30 years after he founded Viator in 1995. “I wish I could say I saw it,” he said, “I can remember in 2005, we were raising money, and one of the venture capital firms we visited had Rich Barton, who was the founding CEO at Expedia, as one of their venture partners. And he was meeting with us, and he said, tours and activities? Is that even a thing?”
Cuthbert and his team though felt that “experiences was a sector that was going to blow up but we couldn’t convince anybody.”
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Categories: Technology