If Google Ruled Everything Related to Travel

Ahh, Google. The Big G. The world’s most popular and frequently visited website. Since it’s humble beginnings in the late 1990’s, Google has come to dominate the world in pretty much everything related to cyberspace and the internet.

In fact, the term ‘just Google it’ is now ingrained in the vernacular and in every language when attention deficit types want to find out something within milliseconds. Actually, I think Google has made the entire world impatient because we take having a simplistic answer to our sometimes vague question provided within an instant for granted. There’s no more of looking stuff up in a book in the library, that’s way too slow these days!

And it’s starting to influence the travel world already – from looking at the cheapest flight to finding accommodation. There is even  a Google Travel Google+ site that has tonnes of followers. Since Google dominates pretty much everything related to the internet, it’s probably only a matter of time before travel is forever influenced by The Big G. I mean, I use Google Maps all of the time to check out new places, and The Big G would know exactly what, when and where I was searching for this information, like is beer available in a certain street in the city I was checking out.

Official Google Travel Logo, but I’m sure Google already knows this is on this silly website

But this provided me with a little of inspiration – the Big G influences so much in our lives, so here is a light-hearted look at how our travel lives would look like if Google did in fact rule everything relating to travel!

Here’s the list!

The Google Travel List – if The Big G Dominated Everything Related to Travel

If Google dominated everything related to travel…

1. Whenever you presented your boarding pass to go on a plane, the display would show up with a list of other similar destinations that you’ve been to before
2. When you go out to drink a beer, the beer dispenser would automatically know which beer you like, and it what size glass it must be poured into
3. If your life depended on eating only the meat version of Spam as a source of sustenance, you will almost certainly die of starvation because Google has almost eliminated it from your corner store shelves
4. If you wanted to show off your travel itinerary to as many people as possible who might be interested, you would have to pay a cost per viewing automatically
5. The travel destination that had more links than the other destination would always be way more popular – even though the destination with less links is much better
6. When you type in the destination ‘Bangkok’, Google would return ‘did you mean you want to go on a sex holiday?’
7. When you type in ‘Australia’, Google would return ‘did you mean you only want to go to Sydney?’
8. When you type in ‘United States’, Google would return ‘did you mean you want to travel to ‘The World?’
9. When doing a road trip, your car would take a photo of every square millimetre of the entire journey
10. If you wanted to let the whole world see what you got up to on your trip, you would have to fork out a tonne of money for an Adwords campaign
11. You wouldn’t bother trying to experience anything when travelling because every travel experience in the world is now available to view on YouTube
12. If an airline loses your luggage and you ask ‘do you know where it is?’, the service desk person would say ‘it’s in 1 of 10394968493056649 places’
13. All of your travel apps to save you time and money have been bought out by Google – which means you now only have one travel related application on your smart phone
14. When booking your hotel, every single website would start with the word ‘cheap’
15. When booking flights, every single website would also start with the word ‘cheap’
16. When booking travel insurance, every single website, once again, would also start with the word ‘cheap’
17. When booking your taxi, every single taxi driver in the world would have a rating out of 5 stars, and you would only choose the taxi drivers that are 5 stars. Problem is, you might be waiting for your taxi for a while..
18. Your Gmail account constantly revolves wallpaper images of where you would rather be when you are in the fluorescent prison (ie. the cubicle). Oh wait, they already do this…
19. The Google that you use in your own country would be vastly different if you decided to use it in China
20. Any travel warnings issued by any foreign affairs department would include ‘just Google [insert country here] to determine your likelihood of a fatal visit’
21. The Google Music service would automatically serve suggestions of what you might want to listen to based on what you have listened to before in the last 5 years or so – which has been determined by the amount of pirated music you have downloaded from the internet after you have Googled it
22. No one in the world would bother to learn another language when travelling abroad because Google Translate converts any crap you say into what you think is the correct translation, even if that translation comes out as something as weird as ‘my hovercraft is full of eels, please fondle my buttocks’
23. You would never use a hardcopy travel guide again because Google Books now owns them all and you store them on one (or all) of your gazillion electronic devices like your smart phone, tablet, laptop and desktop computers
24. Your Google travel buddies wouldn’t be allowed to talk to your Facebook travel buddies, and finally
25. When your passport is scanned by customs, the Google display knows what you have been up to a lot more than the CIA.. ;P

There you go, there is the end of my silly post on what would happen if Google dominated the travel world.

How about you? What have you noticed recently that made you thought ‘has Google really infiltrated this aspect of travel?’ or what do you think what kind of role The Big G will have in the future in relation to travel? Leave a comment and share with the world.

Hopefully, Google will index this silly post so that a crapload more people see it. But I can’t see that happening anytime soon.. 😉

For more silly travel advice, check out Travel Alerts – Warnings We’d Love To See!, Ultimate Funny Bucket List Ideas for Travel – The Silliest One Ever! and How To Find Cheap Flight Tickets. The Stupid Way.

Anyway, if you want to find out how much Google has crept into all of our daily doings, check out In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.