It’s official: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million in cash.
The agreement is subject to regulatory approvals.
Google indicates it will not transition into travel transactions, but will focus on search with ITA Software in the fold.
Google will also evaluate ITA Software’s airline reservations system business, but no decisions have been made about its fate.
Google plans to talk to airlines before making a decision about how to handle ITA’s airline reservations system business.
ITA founder and CEO Jeremy Wertheimer will head Google’s ITA unit.
“ITA’s very talented team has created an impressive product to organize flight information,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google. “Their technology opens exciting possibilities for us to create new ways for users to more easily find flight information online, and we’re looking forward to welcoming them to Google.”
“It is a privilege to work with a most skilled and dedicated team to build innovative technologies that people use every day,” Wertheimer says. “We are all looking forward to continuing and expanding our efforts as part of Google.”
Google says it will honor all of ITA’s existing customer agreements and looks forward to utilizing ITA’s QPX airline shopping and pricing system.
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Mark your calendar – July 1, 2010 The day the travel ecosystem just got a lot more interesting.
Google is seeking improved relevance for search results and needs to tap into the deep web to get them. ITA Software delivers the deep web to Google for air fare search.
ITA’s Needle technology is also very interesting – one can imagine that it can help provide better context and relevance to Google Places Pages which lie at the heart of Google’s location based search efforts.
Pure conjecture, but it seems the gap between ITA’s reportedly desired $1 Billion figure and Google’s $700 Million bid may have been ITA’s airline reservation system technology – hard to say.
But the number I would really like to know is the perceived value of Google structurally positioning itself as the data source for Microsoft’s Bing Travel.
My prediction is that ITA’s Matrix 2 functionality is headed toward a search results page near you at some point in the future.
Democratization of travel information just moved closer to becoming a reality.
Travel technology is about to grow up. This will signal a big shift moving forward.
It’s about bloody time…