Marketing tech
fromSearch Engine Roundtable
2 hours agoGoogle Ads Testing New Layouts for Multi-Location GBP Assets?
Swipeable multi-location assets are being tested in Google Ads, featuring review data for individual locations.
Restaurant owners like Panjwani are caught in the middle of a growing battle of new and established reservation platforms vying for their business. The two dominant players for more than a decade, OpenTable and Resy, are now facing a wave of fresh competition from high-end services and even delivery apps all trying to win lucrative bookings at exclusive establishments.
Digital-savvy airlines use their socials to advertise special offers as a way of strengthening relationships with both new and repeat customers. This can be a win-win for both the customers and the airlines. Travelers get access to limited-time fares, and airlines can boost revenue by filling seats during slower travel periods, such as Caribbean routes during hurricane season.
It isn't a universal truth, but a vast number of goods and services have their own full-circle moments. While there are still plenty of travel agencies in the U.S., the overall number is still down considerably from a peak in the 1980s. For some industry forecasters, though, the future looks a lot like the recent past, except that instead of travelers trusting human agents with making their travel plans a reality, they'll use AI agents for the same purpose.
Travelers are always on the lookout for easy ways to save money, and a new report reveals there is one particular day of the week that is better for booking flights than others. That day happens to be Fridays, according to new data from Expedia that was shared with Travel + Leisure. That is because the end of the week sees less business and corporate travel, the booking site noted.
The off-season practically vanished in many parts of the world. Remote work, social media frenzy, and ruthless dynamic pricing have turned fall and spring into peak-season clones. Even winter is no refuge anymore. The idea of an off-season is 100% disappearing.
Those ads, at least the ones spotted in the wild, were from Expedia and were spotted by Ashley Fletcher from Adthena. He posted this screenshot of them: The query or prompt was [What's the best way to book a weekend away?] and it did not require a follow up prompt to trigger the ads. The ads just showed up at the bottom of the first response.
Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it's preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year's time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.
Across more than 220 global markets, Airbnb primarily relies on card-based payments for bookings. To reduce checkout friction, improve accessibility, and increase adoption in international markets, Airbnb introduced trusted, locally preferred payment methods(LPM) as part of its "Pay as a Local" initiative. The effort enables guests to choose payment options that align with regional preferences while allowing engineering teams to scale support for new methods more efficiently.
For the traveler who finds romance in a curved wall, chases good lighting, and believes a space should quietly seduce, a good design-led vacation rental is the destination as much as the location around it. These are homes chosen for how they look, feel, and linger in our memory-where architecture, interiors, and setting shape the experience of travel itself. Across the sun-washed corners of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and beyond, today's most compelling rentals are as
I don't ever want to think of this as a popularity contest, Palmquist said. I want it to be a way that agents can experience and be introduced to new technology, whether that's in additional types of writing or other ways that we showcase something. I think that by having interviews as a function of the website, showcasing their tech stack, that gives real estate agents in the industry a roadmap to say, I'm going to follow this, or I'm going to emulate this.'
As investors become more sophisticated and debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) lending continues to grow, the appraisal has moved from a back-office requirement to a central risk-control mechanism, especially for income-driven loans. STR income does not behave like traditional rental income; yet, it is often evaluated using tools and assumptions designed for long-term leases. When nightly pricing, seasonality, operational intensity and regulatory exposure enter the equation, the old appraisal playbook starts to break down.