It works for Google as they make basically all the money in online travel. Like, really, Google makes so much money out of travel, it's worth it for them to invest huge amounts on getting people to plan/book travel on their platform, because it just means more money for them.
The biggest players in online travel, Booking Holdings (Fmr Priceline Group) and Expedia combined spent $11B on Google advertising in 2019, which was about half their reported revenues that year.
The point of the blog post – that travel planning apps can't get user retention – doesn't apply to Google, as most people use Google every day anyway, so they already have the retention, and it's easy for them to funnel people into their travel section when they see a user entering travel searches into the main search box.
The biggest players in online travel, Booking Holdings (Fmr Priceline Group) and Expedia combined spent $11B on Google advertising in 2019, which was about half their reported revenues that year.
The point of the blog post – that travel planning apps can't get user retention – doesn't apply to Google, as most people use Google every day anyway, so they already have the retention, and it's easy for them to funnel people into their travel section when they see a user entering travel searches into the main search box.