Feds Approve Google's Purchase of ITA Software 41
itwbennett writes "The US Justice Department has approved Google's $700 million acquisition of online flight-data specialist ITA Software, but with stringent conditions. From a DOJ press release announcing its approval of the purchase: '[I]n order for Google Inc. to proceed with its proposed acquisition of ITA Software Inc., the department will require Google to develop and license travel software, to establish internal firewall procedures and to continue software research and development. The department said that the proposed settlement will protect competition for airfare comparison and booking websites and ensure those websites using ITA's software will be able to power their websites to compete against any airfare website Google may introduce.'"
Re:In case you don't know it... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with your query is that ITA (and the other GDS systems) have to query the individual airline systems to get at the rates - and caching is not effective except as at a "best effort/guess" basis, because rates change dynamically according to algorithms known only to the airlines themselves. That is why, as one gets closer to the date, the cost for any given ticket (same flight/seat-class) increases. This makes it completely ineffective to do a search like you suggest - you would only be able to get the engine's best guess, and it would only be applicable for a given day, or would not be applicable to any given day, but be an average for all days.
Keep in mind, to do a single flight search across the various GDS' that Expedia is connected to, for example, takes on the order of 15 seconds. To answer your queries would require doing either all 68808 searches for round-trip, or 712 (if you are doing single flights and trying to manually connect them) searches. And that data would only be valid for a rather short interval of time, since flights can be sold out at any time, as as a flight gets closer to being sold out, ticket prices for that flight rise automatically.
Google buying ITA will not magically improve this. The airlines realized that they are holding all the cards right now, which means that the little battle-of-wills they have going on between them and the GDSes is heavily skewed towards the airlines. There is a reason there is no longer any money to be made in commissions selling flights through GDS; lead generation is where money is being made (or dynamic packaging, but that is a completely different beast altogether), and that is where I imagine Google is going to go - which is why Kayak was so vocal about this move, since it would, in effect, be cutting them out of the equation - it used to be Kayak buys adwords for particular destinations, generates the search and collects lead generation fees from the airlines by forward to their (or some OTA) site. What Google proposes to do now is skip the first step - granted they will be losing adword revenue if their organic results increase in quality - but will be gaining lead-generation revenue, which likely offsets it, since the traffic funnel is much more qualified than the adword traffic may have been.
Sorry for the ramble/stream-of-consciousness; been a bit frustrated with GDS systems over the past week, having to rewrite a fair bit of interfacing code.