VIDEO: Two opposing views on Google's entry into tours and activities

Google has always been involved in tours and activities - suppliers and online travel agencies would spend their digital marketing dollar with the search, as other brands do elsewhere in the industry.

These companies would also optimize their content to gain visibility in organic search and host their videos on Google-owned YouTube.

But as we first reported earlier this year, Google's Area 120 incubation and experimentation lab has been eyeing the sector for some time has worked to produce an app and service known as Touring Bird - a product that got a full launch in ten cities and with 25,000 products in September.

Essentially a metasearch for tours and activities, Touring Bird (headed by CEO and co-founder Lax Poojary) takes products from online travel agencies and lists results according to a user's location and search criteria.

As with every entry that Google has ever made into a segment of the travel industry, Touring Bird is no different in that it has been met with a mixture of a support, concern and curiosity.

Now that Touring Bird is a fully working product, tour operators, OTAs, vendors, attractions and others involved in the sector are forming a view based on their early use and, of course, experience of how the company has tackled other parts of the industry.

There are a number of questions that many have for Touring Bird, with a large proportion centering on the role of suppliers and OTAs, and how both will work within the new service, as well as other areas such as its development within the wider Google search empire and other tools.

Speaking to PhocusWire over the course of an interview on-stage at the Arival 2018 this week, Poojary says for the time being the content will be sourced via OTAs but suppliers could have a role in the future.

The product is still "very early stage", he says, and many decisions have yet to be made as to, for example, its eventual inclusion in existing search engine results pages.

This wait-and-see approach also goes for elements such as the Reserve With Google tool that is now being used by the likes of Peek and Tiqets to allows users to secure a service within Google, rather than on the product's own site.

The mechanics of Touring Bird are not wholly defined so far, yet its arrival on the scene has inevitably sparked a fair degree of unflattering feedback.

Over the course of two video interviews, PhocusWire gets more details from Poojary about Touring Bird...

...then hears from Viator founder and now consultant, Rod Cuthbert, who shares a very strong view about what the launch of the product could mean for many of the existing players in the sector...