After the European Commission spanked Google with a relatively hefty fine, Google is disabling features such as enabling travelers to search for their travel dates and live pricing for some of its search results in Europe.

Google is also discontinuing a vacation rental search result unit so travelers would have to look for vacation rentals in inconvenient places such as Google Maps.

OTAs and travel metasearch companies have been demanding a level playing field between themselves and Google for years — and this was Google’s response.

In 2024, Google even threatened to revert to the old-fashioned “10 blue links,” and ran a test doing so in several European countries to show how things would be if Google didn’t get its way.

The silver lining for travel companies is that perhaps Google’s tempest will push travelers to go direct to supplier and OTA sites instead of using Google’s degraded experience.

ACCOR GROUP + SKIFT

For this year’s State of Travel report, we created a new travel intelligence framework: the travel stack. Rather than breaking travel down into subsectors, we identified four universal layers that apply to the entire $11 trillion travel industry. Each of these layers also interacts with our earlier Skift Intelligence permission to exist framework.

The CEOs of Hilton, Booking Holdings, Expedia, Uber, Accor, and Airbnb are pressure-testing their assumptions on one stage this September, and the room decides what travel's next chapter looks like.

North Javits Center, September 22-24, with OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor and 940 leaders from 590 companies, 76% at director level or above. Pricing increases tomorrow.

Southwest announces airport lounges and keeps reinventing itself into something almost unrecognizable; Uber cuts 3,300 jobs and pulls focus back to its core as travel ambitions take a back seat, and Emirates unveils a premium economy seat that signals where the real airline revenue war is being fought.

On today's Skift Daily Briefing, Sarah Dandashy breaks down why Southwest's lounge announcement is the latest sign of an airline giving customers fewer and fewer reasons to fly someone else, what Uber's reorg means for its travel products that were never really the point, and why airlines racing to upgrade the middle of the plane is the most important yield story in aviation right now.

How are public travel tech companies performing around the world? The Skift Travel 200 pulls the data you need to know to understand the market. Paid subscribers get full access here.