Livn | key changes to attractions booking through Google | blooloop - Blooloop

Bookings through Google are undergoing major changes, and attraction operators need to pay close attention.

Steve Martinez is Livn founder and CCO. He started Livn, a Google connectivity partner enabling attractions to get direct bookings straight from Google Search Results, in 2011, with the idea that any tour or attraction operator, whatever their size, could harness technology to distribute their product globally, without geographical barriers.

Today, as the company partners with Google’s new ‘Things to Do’, he is responsible for Livn’s strategy, leadership, engineering alignment and direct customer engagement.

Using technology to connect the dots

For 11 years, Martinez had worked for a tour company that handled white water rafting, hot air ballooning, boats to an island, and beach hire kayaks out on the island. He found it was hard to update inventory for global partners.

“We dealt with everyone around the world,” he explains. “We were based up in an area in Australia called Cairns. This has about a million visitors a year. We were using a reservation system which was managing our inventory and updating all our pricing, availability and so on.”

Martinez decided to drop to four days a week, which was unusual at that point:

“For one day a week, I started working on this idea of using the technology we were sitting on to be able to tap into all the tourism operators, using symmetry: available seats, pricing, content. I successfully did that and onboarded about 200...

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