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Does anyone know what makes ITA so special? Why don't any of the big airlines have APIs that Hipmunk, Kayak, Orbitz, etc. can use directly? (Do any of them?) Seems odd that everyone should have to rely on this one company for the data, when it should be originating from the airlines.
Herez my post on why google needed to buy ITA. http://bit.ly/h07ked
http://www.thoughtsonconsumerweb.com/why-google-needs-to-bui...
Does anyone know what makes ITA so special? Why don't any of the big airlines have APIs that Hipmunk, Kayak, Orbitz, etc. can use directly? (Do any of them?) Seems odd that everyone should have to rely on this one company for the data, when it should be originating from the airlines.
The thing to understand is that the airlines publish data that ITA uses. The problem is that it takes an incredible amount of engineering effort and algorithm smarts to go from 'published airline data' to 'this is the cheapest flight from BOS to LAX on 4/20'. ITA does have competitors; historically those competitors offered much lower quality products, although that might have changed.
One of the ITA co-founders wrote a presentation on some of these topics at http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The data is available (not cheaply) from an company called ATPCO, which is owned by the airlines. The airlines publish fares and rules through ATPCO, and ITA, SABRE, and many others fetch the data and run the computations. The computations are the hard part.
So if Hipmunk, Kayak, or whoever wanted to remove their dependency from ITA (by doing more computational stuff themselves), what's the best place for them to get their data?
As for getting processed data, that's called metasearch: scraping other sites' search engines. Kayak started out as pure metasearch, but moved to using ITA. Not sure whether they still do any scraping.
Hipmunk might be in trouble.
They could probably spin new features faster than Google. For example, every service I've seen requires a departure date and return date. In my head, I thinking, "I don't know - sometime this summer." I'd like to be able to pick a destination, the number of days, and have it tell me when I should go on vacation to get the cheapest fares.
I'm sort of surprised this went through since their advantage in search mixed with the power ITA has within their field leads to very powerful mix that could put competitors at a serious disadvantage. Maybe the DoJ saw something I did not to make it less of a problem, but even as a google fan it's... ungh. I don't like this going through.
Does anyone know what makes ITA so special? Why don't any of the big airlines have APIs that Hipmunk, Kayak, Orbitz, etc. can use directly? (Do any of them?) Seems odd that everyone should have to rely on this one company for the data, when it should be originating from the airlines.
Herez my post on why google needed to buy ITA. http://bit.ly/h07ked
1) Bing has stopped investing in travel tech, they now use Kayak for search. So do we still believe in the value prop?
2) Farecast (fare predictor) turns out to be not very valuable. So much so, that Bing couldn't even sustain development of their own search tool. Can Google do a better job of it? Maybe. Can they do a good enough job of if that it's ROI positive? I'm skeptical.
I agree that Google believes many of your assertions. I don't agree that this makes it true. Do people really need more sophisticated travel search functionality? Sure, you can imagine lots of cool stuff -- bells and whistles. But ask Kayak if their "Explore" feature (perhaps a lite version of what you can imagine Google doing with ITA) drives their business? I'd argue it's neat, good for branding and loyalty, but not at the end of the day, a major source of value.
That being said -- the key thesis of: Google trying to hold onto relevance in travel search -- is true. However, they are still pretty much a one-horse show (search revenue), and travel is one of (if not the) biggest vertical today.
Does anyone know what makes ITA so special? Why don't any of the big airlines have APIs that Hipmunk, Kayak, Orbitz, etc. can use directly? (Do any of them?) Seems odd that everyone should have to rely on this one company for the data, when it should be originating from the airlines.
http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
People think the problem is a graph search problem of finding the shortest path. But that's actually the easiest part of the problem. It turns out that prices aren't attached to individual flights, but rather are rules of the form "If the passenger goes from A to B on a Tuesday, the price is X, and it doesn't really matter what flights they take, as long as the total distance is less than 3 times the line of sight distance."
Then there are all sorts of rules about what fares can be combined with other fares, under which conditions, ...
I worked at ITA software on QPX, and their code is by far the most algorithmically complex code I've ever seen. As I mentioned, there are many, many sub problems, and each one is a tricky algorithm design problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Herez my post on why google needed to buy ITA. http://bit.ly/h07ked
While your thesis may be correct, some of your assumptions are a bit off: 1) Bing has stopped investing in travel tech, they now use Kayak for search. So do we still believe in the value prop? 2) Farecast (fare predictor) turns out to be not very valuable. So much so, that Bing couldn't even sustain development of their own search tool. Can Google do a better job of it? Maybe. Can they do a good enough job of if that…
I didn't know Bing was using Kayak now, and Farecast has been quite useful for me (fairly accurate) in the past.
So, I have an interesting perspective to share. I'm graduating and might end up working for Kayak. I know at least part of their infrastructure depends on ITA, and while the existing contract goes until 2013 (I think), Google is obviously looking to compete. Kayak also recently filed for IPO. It's not like Google has never failed at any of its ventures, but to me it seems like it might be a tough competitor to everyo…
So in summary: Worst scenario is pretty darn good for you!
How cool would it be if you could type "flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May" How cool would it be to receive suggestions for flights in May with clusters in my social graph as destinations?