Google To Do Travel with $700m Acquisition of ITA

The latest acquisition announced by Google yesterday is that of ITA Software for $700m. ITA is a flight information software company who is the dominant player in the industry, which produces the data such as availability, flight dates, times and prices for online reservation systems. Google says it intends to use the information to help users find the best flight details direct from their search box. Google, predicting concerned industry players mounting a backlash, have already posted a site to try and pre-empt any arguments. As part of their explanation they include a nice diagram to show how they see things:

Courtesy of Google Press

Bing will no doubt be the most affronted by this deal. They have a reasonable travel feature, but if Microsoft has any sense they will have seen this coming. Nothing gets past Google. They announced the signing of the agreement on their blog:

“While online flight search is rapidly evolving, we think there is room for more competition and greater innovation. Google has already come up with new ways to organize hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, scholarly papers, books and geographic data. Once we’ve completed our acquisition of ITA, we’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket.

“We’re confident that by combining ITA’s expertise as the leading developer of flight information software with Google’s technology we’ll be able to create great user innovations in flight search. ITA has built a very successful QPX business, and we’re looking forward to working with their current and future customers. Google will honor all existing agreements, and we’re also enthusiastic about adding new partners. You can read more about this deal here, and we’ll keep everybody up to date as we work to close this exciting acquisition.”

Since the deal was first reported people have been concerned that the marriage of Google and ITA would create an unfair competitor in the online travel sector, which is now responsible for 50% of airline ticket sales worldwide. Google’s explanation is that ITA was not a competitor in the first place so it is not going to change any market share and that it will honour all agreements which are already in place. Nevertheless, there is little chance that Google will have bought the company just for the sake of it, while they do have a talent for improving user experience; they surely have bigger plans for ITA. For example, currently ITA just does airline data, but how long is it before Google ushers them into hotel and car rental data too?

Google are inside our minds. They have crept along, looked, noted, followed and absorbed everything that we type into our innocent search engine boxes and are going to use this information to comprehensively take over our lives by offering us a better and more efficient way of finding all the information we look for on a daily basis. But does Google really have to take over every single online faction whose user experience can be optimised? Should we be worried?

Google Airlines anyone?

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