Early last month, Google acquired ITA Software, makers of flight information analysis and comparison software, for $700 million. In an acquisition message, Google indicates that their intent is to improve the search of airline travel information and the ability to drive potential customers to airlines and travel agents. Because Google gets a significant amount of ad revenue from the travel sector (8 percent of their ad revenue according to the Wall Street Journal), this ad-centric message makes good sense. I can’t help but think that there is a local search and location component here, and am surprised that this news escaped me for a whole month.
Google’s location information is a natural complement to flight information, and the whole travel experience. While a number of airline travel search sites work to package lodging and rental cars, there’s a great deal of room for better travel experience packaging, and it’s all location based. Imagine the kind of travel intelligence that would help you book travels with a deeper knowledge of the surrounding amenities (Maps with Street View and Google Earth) around your hotel, as well as a virtual concierge that might help you plan the best experience.
I sincerely doubt if this purchase was entirely around the idea of delivering just flight comparison capabilities. My sense is that there’s an opportunity to build an entire travel planning platform that would include location specific details down to street views, along with search capabilities that could map and package an itinerary for a seamless travel experience. The benefits of online tools and search have streamlined much of our lives, but there’s still a great deal of needlessly time-consuming elements to the whole travel planning experience.
The way technologies are converging to help us collect data about places and experiences, and to navigate this data whether at our desks or on the street, the creation of a two-way travel platform where data is collected and shared would be an easy extension of Google’s current capabilities. The resources of the organization, and the public participation that they already enjoy, would help them leap far ahead of many competitors.
There is a great deal of local search revenue that is possible in the vacation space as you’ve likely witnessed the walls of attraction flyers and multiple competing destination magazines at top tourist destinations. As print publications fade from relevance, there’s an online opportunity for the creation of an omnibus of attraction information. From a consumer’s standpoint, wouldn’t it be great to have a better ability to cut through all this clutter to quickly find meaningful experiences?
