Talking travel scams with Google CEO Sundar Pichai - an imaginary meeting Part 1

Providing users with high quality, accurate and trusted information is sacrosanct to us.
Sundar Pichai, CEO Google
US Congress 11 December 2018

By some analysis, Google is the biggest travel company in the world. Its pervasiveness across so many areas of commercial activity can blur efforts to make sense of its impact on a specific industry like travel.

I've been aware of Google’s enormous impact on the travel and tourism industry since I started publishing Rusty Compass more than a decade ago. I've had to reluctantly accept the company at the centre of my professional world since then. I use a bewildering array of Google services in my businesses - Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google DFP, Google Search Console, Google Documents, Google Cloud, YouTube, Google My Business, Google G Suite, Google Maps, Google Reviews, Google AMP, Google Pagespeed - there may be more.

All of these products contribute in diverse ways to Google’s expansive market power. The list of Google impacts on the travel space is long and I intend to explore these in future pieces here at thinkingtravel.com. I’ll also be looking at other big tech players like Facebook, TripAdvisor and the big OTAs.

Travel is an especially revealing place to explore Google’s character and impact. It’s an area of high profitability for the company - at least it was pre-COVID - and it crosses into so many areas of the company’s activity - as my list above shows.

Google has been in the news a lot lately. CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent appearance at US Congressional hearing alongside other tech heavies, Bezos, Cook and Zuckerberg, represented a rare foray into the public domain from one of the world’s most secretive companies. At Google, different standards apply to corporate secrecy and the privacy rights of the users of the company’s products.

As I watched Mr Pichai facing questions from congressmen and women, I wondered which travel issue I might raise with him - given the opportunity. There are so many issues, but Pichai is a busy man so if I was to meet him, I’d need to keep my questions brief. I would start with a single Google failure and source of consumer harm that is emblematic of some of the biggest failings of Google and big tech - the culture that privileges scale and profit above accountability, in a way that is not available to most corporations.

Most of my insights about big tech and travel come from my other other home, Vietnam, where I’ve worked in travel for almost 3 decades. Vietnam’s arrival on the global tourism stage in the 1990s coincided with the arrival of big tech. You could say they’ve grown up together.

In my short hearing, I would ask Sundar about widespread scamming that is enabled on Google’s ad network, specifically the prominence of fake airline scammers in Google’s paid search results in Vietnam. Variations of these scams occur elsewhere in Google’s ad network all around the world so I suspect Sundar is aware of them.

The scam works like this. Criminals create fake websites copying key elements from airline websites, and then buy up ad space on Google to promote the scam sites. The more lucrative the scam, the more money the scammer has to buy up ads on Google. Google’s interests are aligned with the scammer’s. These scams have been bringing profits to Google (and the scammers) at the expense of travellers for years. I have no idea what happens when travellers click on these Google's ads and find themselves on the fake airline websites. But I doubt it’s good.

Vietnam's successful budget airline, Vietjet, is widely scammed by third parties copying its website with URL's like vietjets.com.vn, vietjetonlines.vn and promoting their fake sites with Google ads that put their links at the top of Google search results. The fake websites look like the real Vietjet website and would be especially effective in Vietnamese, where English language airline names are likely to cause confusion. Like most scams, this one would be most effective on the elderly and the vulnerable.

A Vietnam search for the Vietjet website. Good luck finding it in this lot.

One of the fakes.

And the real thing

Vietnam's national carrier, Vietnam Airlines, finds itself scammed too. Vietnamairslines.com (note the stray "s") is a Google ads partner scamming travellers and enriching the burghers at Google.

Vietnam Airslines

And the real thing

Google is more than a passive enabler of these scams. The company presents the ads at the top of its search results, which are barely distinguishable from the real "organic" search results. It's very easy for consumers to be snared.

If Google can’t keep scams out of the advertising network from which is derives its profits, and where it has a direct relationship with scammers or their agents, what hope that it can protect consumers from scammers in its search results, reviews, YouTube and other Google products? What hope that Google can shield us from COVID misinformation, political extremism, trolling and malicious lies? What hope that Sundar can make good on his promise of providing “high quality, accurate and trusted information”.

The negligence of governments when it comes to protecting consumers from these scams is even more egregious than Google's complicity.

If web giants like Google and Facebook were subject to the same commonsense regulation and accountability that governs most businesses, these scams would quickly disappear. Their stubborn persistence over years proves the unaccountability at the heart of Google's ad business and the principles upon which the company is founded. It also proves that it will take a lot of effort to persuade Google to uphold Mr Pichai’s aspiration.

Google's capacity to maintain its reputation and its grubby business model in spite of the harm caused by these and other scams are feats more impressive than any of its technological accomplishments.