Google Introduces Flight Search

Google made further inroads into the travel category Tuesday with the quiet launch of Flight Search, a web-based tool that lets you find and book flights.

Google provided what it called an “early look” at the service on Tuesday with flights to and from a handful of cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and Minneapolis. Participating airlines include Delta, JetBlue, Continental and American.

Flight Search is a more user friendly version of a service Google launched in May. It offered flight info when you typed “flights from [a city] to [another city]” in the Google search window.

Google made its first formal foray into that segment last July with the $700 million purchase of ITA, developer of the airfare search and pricing system QPX that is used by major airlines.

A video below explains the service further:

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Kayak Offers Deals On One-Way Fares From Separate Airlines In Roundtrip Flight Search

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Most power airfare searchers know that buying two one-way tickets on separate airlines can sometimes be cheaper than buying a roundtrip ticket on the same airline. But on most travel search portals you have to do a little digging to find these one way fares, and sites like Kayak wouldn’t pair two one-way fares from different airlines. Today, Kayak is integrating these fares, which the company has dubbed ‘Hacker Fares’ into flight search.

So if you are looking weekend roundtrip flight from New York to San Francisco, and the best price is $600 for an economy ticket on Airline A, you’ll also see the price options for two one-way fares on Airline A and Airline B, which may be cheaper. Kayak calls these Hacker Fares because searching and matching separate airline and travel sites for these cheaper one-way fares requires a bit of hacking.

Kayak has even trademarked the term and filed a patent for the technology. CMO Robert Birge says that airlines won’t be upset over this because the company is simply searching what’s already out there via flight data on the web.

While Birge won’t reveal how often a roundtrip fare on the same airline is more expensive than two separate one-way fares on different airlines, he did say that Kayak expects the addition of Hacker Fares to impact a ‘significant percentage of queries’ on a daily basis.

Kayak, which filed its S-1 nearly a year ago, appears to be holding off on its plans go public. As the company reported in its most recent filing, revenue is up but net income is down. Kayak could be waiting for Google to launch its own ITA-powered flight search tools and services that will directly compete with Kayak.

Kayak is a travel search engine. It indexes hundreds of global travel sites to help you find the right flight, hotel, rental car or cruise line. Once...

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