Exactly one year after it announced plans to acquire Boston, Mass.-based ITA Software, it now seems Google is ready to unveil ITA-powered flight search in the next few weeks.

Google ready for flight

According to this TechCrunch report, Google is planning to offer both a search query-based tool, like Bing’s Price Predictors, as well as a map-based one, like Kayak’s Explore.

Under the query-based system, if someone searched for “flights from San Francisco to London,” the results would include flight times and prices, presumably with links to supplier or online travel agent (OTA) sites where travelers could book the flight.

Users also could combine search queries with geo-locations. So if someone in New York searched for a “beach vacation” or “flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in July,” the results might include airfares to Florida or North Carolina. With the map-based tool, travelers would be able to set filters and choose a price range, and get the results on a map.

There are many more possibilities that Google could go through with, as explored by Travel Tech Consulting and Travel Weekly. But the fact is that Google has stated clearly that it “does not plan to sell airline tickets directly.”

“By acquiring ITA we hope to build flight comparison tools that make it easier for users to compare prices and find the best possible deal,” said Andrew Silverman, senior product manager for Google in a blog post defending the $700 million acquisition of ITA Software. “When someone searches for “flights from San Francisco to London,” we’d like to provide not just “10 blue links” but exact flight times and prices as well—just as our competitors do today.”

That is exactly what Bing Travel started offering earlier this year with Price Predictors. The kicker, of course, is that Bing licenses ITA Software to do this. Bing also recently teamed up with Kayak for providing flight-search results, and Kayak’s flight search is powered by ITA Software too.

Apart from travel price-comparison sites, ITA is used directly by six of the top 10 air carriers in the United States and powers 65 percent of carrier-direct flight sales.

So it’s no big surprise that Microsoft, Kayak and the other FairSearch coalition members are hopping mad about the Google-ITA merger, which was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice in April 2011. Kayak has more reason to worry given the threat to its flight meta-search business and its pending $50 million IPO.

More details: Facts about Google’s acquisition of ITA Software

Photo – TenSafeFrogs

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