Almost three years on from announcing the acquisition of ITA Software and 18 months after launching a domestic-only service, Google Flight Search is finally heading overseas.
From today, travellers in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands will now be able to look for flights on Google Flight Search in the same way as their North American counterparts.
Flights originating in those countries to any other airport in the world will be included in the system – a massive leap in functionality from the slightly limited array of services available until now.
Some low cost carriers are missing, inevitably, such as European giants EasyJet and Ryanair – the former being easier to pick up as a metasearch engine these days, but Ryanair almost non-existent on comparison sites.
Prices will be displayed in the relevant local currency and searches will be available at a country level (London to Greece, for example) as well as specific airports.
Searches can be carried out in eight languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Dutch) and all existing search tools, such as lowest fare graphs, maps and “relevant flights”, are also included in the roll-out.
ITA Software, seen as a North America-focused provider until now, is powering this initial phase of the roll-out (rather than another technology firm working with Google behind the scenes).
Google says it is hoping to bring the service to more countries in due course, as it expands its relationship with other airlines.
In the some respects the launch of Google Flight Search into Europe is a bit of a non-story, flight search providers expand their services to new territories all the time.
But the background is often more interesting than the announcement.
Within a few months of Flight Search being launched in the US, Google said the international roll-out would be “coming soon” – two words which have since gone on to haunt the company given that such expansion didn’t materialise for another 18 months.
In November last year, vice president of travel at Google (and ex-CEO of ITA Software), Jeremy Wertheimer, said the company was taking a more cautious approach to taking Google Flight Search outside of North America.
“International expansion requires working with partners,” Wertheimer said, “and to do that requires time in the airline space.” Furthermore, growing internationally was “a long game” and Google was spending a lot of effort “scientifically looking at things”.
Of course, since November last year the world of international travel metasearch (on the flight side) has shifted considerably.
On the eve of Wertheimer claiming Google had a new and cautious nature to launching in new markets, Priceline went and bought US metasearch giant Kayak for ÂŁ1.8 billion.
Meanwhile, Skyscanner continues its rapid growth around Europe and elsewhere.
So, while Google will never admit it, the need to push Flight Search in to new markets is now more important than ever.
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About Kevin May
Congratulations Google, welcome to the jungle that is intra-European flights.
We are underwhelmed (as we expected to be, after seeing their US-based product) and fail to understand Google’s motives for even entering this business. Well, the money of course, yes, but why enter a market with a half-product?
Not trying to be cynical, it just truly seems odd.
(And when I say “We” in that comment, I mean Dohop)
Do you think some people will type the flight search into Google, and will then use the result to select a route and fare and execute a purchase? If so, there’s your answer why they are rolling it out: because it will sell tickets and bring in revenue, one way or another, directly or indirectly as the case may be.
From the market share point of view, what does it matter if you provide a superior discrete service downstream of search if Google takes your customer share anyway because they are upstream from you in the flow? It’s not fair from anyone else’s perspective; but from theirs it is fair, because they are the ones who have invested all those billions to establish the upstream position.
I understand this, it is the part where they decide to go into this business to begin with that I don’t get.
Google also gets a lot of searches for…. erm… “adult video material”. Should they now venture into that business?
Google’s open non-secret ambition is to mediate all the world’s information. All of it. That’s the goal. The business aspect of that is to monetize it. Travel just happens to be a leading market of the myriad they are working on, because of the enormous balance of travel-related searches.
I have no doubt that if there was no social stigma, that they would be avidly working on joint ventures (as it were) with the pornography industry. They already are making some huge amount of money off those searches, after all. But because of the stigma, it’s just not in their interest to make adult content an obvious business.
But I really don’t see why you are complaining, especially if your business gets little traffic of the type that Google is diverting to Flight Search. So it’s inferior; big deal. It’s obviously making money, and like many inferior things sold by superior companies, maybe one day it will be superior.
I agree with Miramon. Google is a travel company. It’s a hotel metasearch, a flight metasearch, a map software, a travel guide, a review site and lots more. But, first and foremost, it is a search engine and makes money from advertising. If you rely on Google for traffic and that was organic traffic, forget it, noone will find you any more. Why would they: if they search for “flights to London” Google will give them the exact thing they are looking for! And if you were buying sponsored ads, prepare to pay a lot more as competition increases on bidding for flight-related searches.
Go on, throw a stone at me. Tell me how you have a better UI, how you scan more flight providers, how you have more functionality, how your design is sexier…. But before you go on, tell me how much traffic you are currently getting from Google.
Well, for starters, our UI is much better and….
Seriously though, for February, 27% of our traffic was from search traffic from Google, and most of that was on variations of Dohop (“Dohop.com”, “”Do hop”, “Dohop flights”….)
Much of the traffic is from our whitelabel, airport and airline partners, and the rest is direct, as a result of branding (the part where having a good UI pays off).
Google’s product is simply inferior to us, and all the the other proper metasearches and OTAs. And just because Google can help you find a good recipe for strawberry cheesecake, doesn’t mean they should open a bakery.
Yes Johann, I’ve already seen you saying in the past how you are proud of not relying on Google too much. Good strategy! And your positioning with affiliate partners is certainly paying off. Indeed, I see you more as B2B than B2C provider.
Hmmmm … I have to admit that my expectations were incredible high. Incredible high in particular as Google was using huge words when starting this exercise. They wanted to enter the market and redefine flight search.
What we now see is indeed disillusioning. I think we all were aware of the fact that they used for their first launch in North America a giant static cache, which returned the results so impressively fast.
I think it was also clear to all of us that this would not work the remaining markets on this planet.
However, they wanted to redefine search and what we see now is nothing else than another meta searcher … and not even a good one.
The only difference I see is that this search also works through the universal search of Google (“Flights from Manchester to Singapore”). Unfortunately this difference obviously really makes the difference, but it does not change the fact that I and probably many other are deeply disappointed.
David