Google has made some changes to its mobile site, which makes it easier to find and book vacation rentals from your smartphone.
The search giant already partners with services like Expedia, HomeAway, Hotels.com, RedAwning, Rentals United, TripAdvisor, VRBO and many more. Which makes it easy to find and book hotels from your smartphone’s browser. But now, you can choose to include vacation rentals in the search results. You can of course search by price, amenities and a lot more. Allowing you to find the perfect vacation rental for your needs.
This is building on the redesign that Google launched last year for its hotel search experience on both mobile and desktop. Where you could search for hotels by location, ratings, and price. The difference now is that Google is adding more vacation rentals, giving you a wider assortment of rentals to look up and potentially book for your upcoming vacation.
Google says that vacation rental properties are going to appear on the mobile website worldwide. So this is not another US only thing.
Since this is Google, you also have the ability to see ratings and reviews for that particular rental. Allowing you to see if it is worth the price that is being charged – or if that price is too good to be true. You also have the ability to see photos from other users that have stayed there, in addition to the pictures the owner has uploaded. This information comes from Google Maps, as you might expect. So it’s all crowdsourced, and gives an accurate depiction of what to expect with that rental.
Vacation season is almost here, which makes this the perfect time for Google to be rolling out this feature to its mobile site. Many people are still going to head to their favorite travel site to book their vacation, but since Google has really improved its flight and hotel search features, you may not need apps like Expedia and Priceline anymore. As you can book it all straight from Google. This is going to make travel sites pretty cautious in the future, seeing as users won’t really need them anymore. With Google no longer sending users to those sites. Though, this is nothing new for Google, it is always trying to make things easier for users and use less clicks to get things done.
Google also says that within the next month it will be bringing the vacation rental filters to the Google Hotels desktop website. Google hopes that this makes it easier to book your vacation rentals this summer, as summer is almost upon us, which means plenty of vacations. Typically, Google would release this to the desktop version of its site first, before mobile. But seeing as many are using their smartphones for everything, instead of their laptop or desktop computer, this does make a lot more sense. Google hasn’t given a firm time for the rollout on desktop, so it could be in the next few weeks, or further down the road.