Google Flight Search

[krainey]

Google Flight Search launched today, as the first product to emerge from Google's acquiring ITA earlier this eyar. So far it only shows round-trip domestic flights (multi-city and one-way bookings are said to be coming soon), but it offers an impressive number of ways to search. There's a bar graph for visually comparing prices on different days, travelers can get recommendations for destinations based on travel time or price from their home airport, and search results can be sorted by price, time, duration of flight, or airline.

The booking on Google Flight Search is done by picking your flights and then following a link to the airline's website, which skips the additional booking surcharge found on other travel search engines.

Anyone used it yet? How well do you think it works?

[d360]

Here's a picture of Google's Flight search and Youtube Video demo flight search picture and video. Right now its pretty basic functionality but expect Google to refine this over time and start charging OTA's and airlines for flight searches.

[hamsrter_23]

I just saw the video, and my first thought was impressive! Google Flight Search seems to work nicely and very quick... obviously, it's still early doors hence US only.

Other thoughts I have about the flight search are: 1) how long will Google wait till it starts monetising it? 2) Will airlines with smarter balance between time of flight and price for the most traveled routes be favoured in the Search Results?

What do you guys think?

[20/20 catch]

hey hamsrter_23...Google Flight Search is super fast and since Google launched the feature competitors such as Priceline, Travelocity and Kayak have been losing a lot of potential customers because Google is putting up its own Flight Search results on the top of its search pages.

Apparently these websites are fuming with Google because they rely on Google for 10-20% of their web traffic, which I don't understand because I dont think Google had a contract where it said Google couldn't be a player in the travel industry...some food for thought;)

[awsomee]

I too find it interesting that competitors who receive traffic from Big G are angry because G is giving itself top billing in their search page results. I say fair play to Big G since us "consumers" won't lose out in this war between the travel industry giants. Companies like Orbitz and Kayay won't be able to compete with G because they operate on a third party basis; while G offers direct bookings.

[estupendod]

google seems to be under a lot of heat as of late..first the anti-trust hearing regarding its ads and now its flight search results. what do i make of it? well google is giving its own search results preferential treatment by overriding its own search algorithms to serve its own purposes. is this wrong?yes and not....however, what I care the most is whether Google has a better flight search tool than the others that benefits me (the consumer).

[brightsuntravel]

Hi krainey, This is really helpful. Thanks for this!