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Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

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Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#81

Post by giantfuzzypanda »

solutionyogi wrote: post #78
alec wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine. We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com , put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights". Many of our cus…

From the page you linked: Note: Tickets cannot be purchased directly from ITA Software. If you find a fare you like, you can give the information from this site to your travel agent or airline when making a booking. This is a deal breaker. I do not want to contact travel agent OR airline customer rep for booking my tickets. I want to find the best fare, enter my credit card and be done. Also, why should Travel Agent…

ITA Software provides the back-end for other online travel companies. They don't actually sell tickets, so if someone is misinformed about their site and tries to buy a ticket they are told where to actually do so.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#82

Post by pinko »

symesc wrote: post #80
mkramlich wrote: post #5

gigantic move in the travel industry ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement. (I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

I dunno. Do people really have trouble finding the cheapest flights with the likes of Kayak and Farecast around already? My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that…

It's not just about prices, it's about routings. For roughly the same price (give or take $100), I often have 50-100 options for each segment, of wildly varying convenience and robustness (in terms of flight time, layover, delay likelihood, airline, etc.). Their system does an incredibly good job laying out this info in a comprehensible form, and more importantly, providing an advanced routing language that allows me to say, for example:

MSN :: AA ORD AA X AZ

BLQ :: AZ X AA ORD AA

...which means I want an American Airlines flight from Madison, WI, connecting through O'Hare, and continuing on to Bologna, Italy, with one and only one intermediate connection, with the over-the-pond leg on AA, and the final leg on Alitalia.

It can then lay out the options for me graphically, so I can instantly see which flights have nasty layovers or bad schedules without having to parse a single text digit.

It's not just about price.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#83

Post by kksm19820117 »

alec wrote: post #44
Alex3917 wrote: post #14

Hopefully Google will make flight search suck less. Currently even the most basic searches like "What's the cheapest I can fly from any airport within 50 miles of my house to any airport within 50 miles of NYC at any point during August" are impossible. I understand it's a computationally expensive question, but why the hell can't I just buy $5 bucks worth of computing time for an answer if I potentially stand to sav…

I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine. We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com , put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights". Many of our cus…

Interesting.

The user experience of the Cleartrip site is startingly similar to that your link leads to.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#84

Post by litewulf »

hga wrote: post #65
SkyMarshal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google. And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.

How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's unlikely they've been 100% successful.

I recall people panning the purchase of grandcentral because of the incredibly long delay between purchase and launch of Google Voice...

It is hard to tell what purpose a company is acquired for (talent, technology, marketshare...) and thus difficult to tell whether it was fruitful.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#85

Post by alexdong »

I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money.

Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for growth. Allow me to explain.

I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility to create values for its shareholders. But that doesn't mean it should keep expanding into anywhere "consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of (needs for) computation". Just like Microsoft keeps on expanding into any desktop software market that has a rapid growth.

There are so many important questions that are yet to be solved. The search is still a pretty dumb statistics engine. Google still can't distinguish between "who wrote python" and "when was python written?". Wikipedia's Python entry shows up in both cases and other results are irrelevant. Why wouldn't the company who invented "20% time rule" continues to make the web better?

Maybe that's the nature of public company and maybe this is just another case where human gets sucked into the rules of wall streets.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#86

Post by nl »

wglb wrote: post #69
hga wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know this space at all; what are the other options?

Think Bigtable.

Interestingly, apparently Google has the MySQL query engine running on BigTable.

That might make migrating from Oracle to BigTable a bit easier.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#87

Post by mkramlich »

symesc wrote: post #80
mkramlich wrote: post #5

gigantic move in the travel industry ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement. (I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

I dunno. Do people really have trouble finding the cheapest flights with the likes of Kayak and Farecast around already? My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that…

Kayak also runs on top of ITA

(only 90% sure, i can't find my notes to confirm right now. i had to know this a few months ago for work reasons)

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#88

Post by mkramlich »

solutionyogi wrote: post #78
alec wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine. We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com , put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights". Many of our cus…

From the page you linked: Note: Tickets cannot be purchased directly from ITA Software. If you find a fare you like, you can give the information from this site to your travel agent or airline when making a booking. This is a deal breaker. I do not want to contact travel agent OR airline customer rep for booking my tickets. I want to find the best fare, enter my credit card and be done. Also, why should Travel Agent…

What you desire is the exact sort of use case that companies like Orbitz were created to serve.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#89

Post by smaher »

mkramlich wrote: post #87
symesc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. Do people really have trouble finding the cheapest flights with the likes of Kayak and Farecast around already? My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that…

Kayak also runs on top of ITA (only 90% sure, i can't find my notes to confirm right now. i had to know this a few months ago for work reasons)

Yes, it does. It's in the press release at: http://investor.google.com/releases/2010/0701.html

"ITA's QPX software tool for organizing flight information is used by leading airlines and travel distributors worldwide including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Bing, Continental Airlines, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and others."

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#90

Post by mkramlich »

dryicerx wrote: post #18

Looking forward to finding amazing flight deals in the very near future assuming Google will take this to a whole new level. I wonder what this means for Kayak/Bing/Orbitz

In the near term, may be no major impact (visible to their respective users anyway, though there will be ripples under the hood.) Longer term, generally some flavor of bad. However, as others have mentioned, one silver lining in this event is that it may increase demand for some sort of pseudo-ITA replacement company upstart to slide in sideways and takeover providing this service. Perhaps new ventures will be formed to do exactly this. But there will also be chilling effects on other enterprises and projects. So it's really hard to say.

It definitely takes Google one step closer to a position where they can make Kayak/Orbitz-like sites a little more irrelevant. Are they all the way there yet? Of course not. Also, Google has a track record of being pretty shitty in certain areas (like customer service, especially human contact, voices and bodies, etc.) and so those are areas where they can still differentiate. Plus, there's still no sign of Google wanting to get into taking the booking orders. Just the fare/trip search. Search of any kind is something that clearly their infrastructure and scale is going to have massive competitive advantages in delivering. Booking: not really. And many OTA's and metasearch sites make their profit on booking fees and kickbacks, not really on search itself, which for them is more of a cost center (though they do sometimes monetize those use cases too in various ways as well -- this is where they will hurt the most, in medium term).

Also, Google has said it plans to honor the existing ITA contracts. But who knows how long or how pervasive that will be in the future. I personally know of one startup that came very close to signing a contract to get service from ITA and we actually backed down ultimately, in part, because of the fear of lock-in to their service. Plus they were expensive. ITA is/was a bit like the Oracle of fare search products. Good shit, but really expensive shit. At least for a wee little startup.

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