Google has just taken a giant leap into Travel through its recent $700m USD acquisition of the mathematician-heavy Ivy-leaugers at ITA Software.
TechCrunch has a great write-up of the acquisition
Google now has a foothold into flight pricing – and a powerful one at that. ITA’s QPX flight shopping and pricing engine has won rave reviews for it’s speed and scalability. It’s already powering a number of supplier, OTA, and meta-search sites – including Continental, Air Canada, Orbitz, Kayak, and interestingly enough Google’s competitor Bing.
It will also be interesting to see if or how Google integrates ITA”s Matrix 2 flight search result displays. You can see an example of Matrix 2 in action here.
Even more intriguing than new Search Results displays is to ponder how Google will plan to utilize ITA’s reservation management solution, named RES, to get in the same booking management business long dominated by SABRE and TravelPort in the US. Could Google become another CRS supplier?
Imagine the amount of customer targeting capabilities Google could have if it’s platform knew your travel patterns before they were even in effect. Google’s access to PNR data is a marketer’s dream. You could cross-sell and upsell from the time of booking through the time of return across all of Google’s ad network touchpoints. Now, Google just needs to have someone be the first to buy into ITA’s reservation platform….any takers?