Bobby Healy is an experienced inventor and technology entrepreneur specialising in booking engine software. Having begun his career building computer games for Nintendo at 16 years of age, he joined CarTrawler in 2005. Over the following 14 years he built CarTrawler – the world’s largest mobility marketplace for airlines, and led two successful LBOs for the business in which he now serves as a board member. Prior to joining CarTrawler, Bobby founded Eland Technologies which he later sold to airline technology giant SITA and remained as CTO until 2005. His booking solutions are now in use by 80% of the world’s top 20 airlines. Bobby continues to be an avid computer programmer and is a frequent speaker on the international circuit on subjects related to technology in the airline industry, ancillary revenue and online distribution. For the last 3 years, he’s been building ‘Manna’ - a Drone Delivery as a Service business for the world with which he plans to revolutionise the world of online food delivery.
Fines don’t work. All they do is they delay everything. The most practical and clear cut action, as I said, is that I think Google need to be, not broken up, but in the case of travel, Google Flights needs to be sold off. I think it has a huge conflict with the entire industry in that it has an unnatural and unfair advantage in its access to the Google Search funnel and that gives it an unfair advantage over the rest of the world.
I think Google Flights on its own could be a very valid product, it’s a great product, there’s no argument that it’s an inferior product now, they’ve done a great job. But, I think it’s got an unnatural advantage and that unnatural advantage is being used to abuse the search monopoly and the android monopoly.
I think the easiest, clear cut and effective change would be to force a divestiture of Google Flights. That would be a great starting point because that will immediately prevent Google from extracting a tax from the entire airline industry at the cost of not just the airlines but also OTA’s. That’d be a great start. Even that signal alone would put Google on a footing that they would be very careful about replicating similar moves in any other vertical. For me, it’s the easiest one to do, it’s short of an entire break up but it would certainly cure what might be the future for the next ten years.
Bobby Healy is an experienced inventor and technology entrepreneur specialising in booking engine software. Having begun his career building computer games for Nintendo at 16 years of age, he joined CarTrawler in 2005. Over the following 14 years he built CarTrawler – the world’s largest mobility marketplace for airlines, and led two successful LBOs for the business in which he now serves as a board member. Prior to joining CarTrawler, Bobby founded Eland Technologies which he later sold to airline technology giant SITA and remained as CTO until 2005. His booking solutions are now in use by 80% of the world’s top 20 airlines. Bobby continues to be an avid computer programmer and is a frequent speaker on the international circuit on subjects related to technology in the airline industry, ancillary revenue and online distribution. For the last 3 years, he’s been building ‘Manna’ - a Drone Delivery as a Service business for the world with which he plans to revolutionise the world of online food delivery.
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