Google Inc is buying the Frommer's line of travel guidebooks, the latest move to amass a trove of publishing content that could strengthen the No 1 Internet search company's push to become a major online travel broker.
The sale by John Wiley & Sons Inc comes nearly a year after Google's $151 million purchase of Zagat Survey, which offers reviews of restaurants, hotels and nightclubs in cities around the world.
The deal will meld the 55-year-old travel publisher's deep database of hotels and sights into a search giant that is seeking to position its services across the entire trip-planning process, from searching for a holiday destination and looking up hotel reviews to booking tours and restaurants in far-flung cities.
As a result, analysts said, Google is increasingly threatening a range of companies, like review site Yelp Inc and flight and hotel booking service TripAdvisor , which are scrumming for a slice of the growing online travel market.
"It's been Google's overarching strategy to dominate the travel vertical," said B. Riley & Co analyst Sameet Sinha. "They want to dislodge these vertical search engines that may have gained over the last few years."
Google's local search efforts - headed by its high-profile executive Marissa Mayer until she left to head Yahoo Inc last month as chief executive - has been a priority for the search engine.
Since acquiring Zagat, Google has given more and more space on its search results page to business listings from Zagat, a practice that has drawn regulatory scrutiny and criticism from competitors like Yelp.
By teaming up with Frommer's, which publishes 350 titles and covers over 4,000 destinations, Google could further expand its reach internationally and beef up information on local hotels and tourist activities across the globe.
In recent years, Google has not hesitated to offer top dollar for other properties that it believed could strengthen its local commerce offerings.
For an acquirer like Google, the most valuable part of Frommer's is its extensive database of business listings and tourist hotspots that have been maintained and curated for years and can be integrated into Google's deep pools of data, analysts said.
"When Google buys Frommer's they're not really buying a book publisher or imprint, they're buying a database with both content and photography," Lorraine Shanley, president at Market Partners International, a publishing consulting firm in New York.
A Google spokeswoman said that over time, the company would integrate the content acquired from Frommer's with Zagat.
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