Mountain View, California — After battling the regulatory process and competitors trying to block the deal, finally having finalized its $700 million acquisition of the travel software concern ITA in April, and on Tuesday, Google showed some of the first fruits of that union with a new service called Google Flight Search, competing head-to-head with travel search engines like Kayak, Orbitz and Microsoft’s Bing.
Google is bundling up the new airline schedule feature to its search arsenal, making looking for flights potentially as easy as googling yourself. “Google Flight Search” as it is dubbed, is the first fruit of Google’s consolidation of ITA Software, the flight data provider it acquired in April after a prolonged antitrust investigation by the Justice Department. The feature, rolling out over the course of the day, will initially be limited to some U.S. cities and display results for round-trip economy flights only.
Google is rolling out a new flight search feature. (Credit: Google)
To access the service, users click a “flights” tab in the left-hand panel on Google.com, which leads to the new Flight Search feature, where users can make changes to dates, destinations, and filters much more quickly than it takes on most travel sites. However, users can also enter their query into Google.com search page or type into “flights from San Francisco to New York,” for instance.
Google said flights are chosen primarily based on cost and total travel time. The company sets the filters for price and flight duration options it “deems reasonable,” though users may adjust the filters to see more flights. The company also emphasized that flight results are not influenced by any paid relationships–meaning airlines that advertise on Google does not get preferential placement on Google’s Flight Search.
“Airlines control how their flights are marketed, so as with other flight search providers, our booking links point to airline Websites only,” explained Kourosh Gharachorloo, Google engineering director, in a blog post. “We are working to create additional opportunities for our other partners in the travel industry to participate as well.”
Moreover, the service will also display a simple list of relevant flights, a way to figure out which travel dates are least expensive by dragging the date selector forward or backward and to compare lots of dates at once on a bar chart. Users can also explore possible destinations, filtering by airline, flight time, and price. For example, users can view a map and use filters to see where flights will take them for a specific amount of money.
Robert Birge, chief marketing officer for Kayak, said the site uses multiple data sources and proprietary technology.
“We are confident in our ability to compete, and we believe our flight search technology is superior,” he said in a statement. “We recognize Google is a formidable competitor but they have not been successful in every vertical they have ventured in.”
The assumption that Google would leverage its dominant position in search advertising to promote those who paid for ads was certainly one of the concerns Google faced since it offered to buy ITA in July 2010.
However, Expedia, Kayak and others in October formed the FairSearch.org coalition to oppose Google’s acquisition of ITA as being anti-competitive. These companies, which were later supported by Microsoft Bing, argued that Google would cut off their access to the ITA data firehose.
The service has been anticipated since Google last year disclosed its intention to buy ITA Software, which makes the flight search software used by many airlines and travel search engines like Orbitz and Bing. The deal underwent intense antitrust scrutiny, but the Department of Justice approved the acquisition, with caveats, in April.
Google promised to honor ITA’s existing contracts, which was one of the conditions imposed on it by the DOJ, the regulator that blessed the deal five months ago.
Google produced a video showing the service in action, which is embedded below.
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