Bing Travel quietly introduced a Your Flight Summary feature, which provides consumers with savings options if they add a stop or alter their travel dates.

When conducting a flight search, a Your Flight Summary box appears, pointing out how you might be able to save money flying on a nonstop — instead of making a stop each way — if only you departed and returned a day later than planned.

In the above example, Bing says you can save $44 off a $418 San Diego-New York roundtrip, with one stop each way, if you fly nonstop and leave and return one day later.

Bing Travel introduced the Your Flight Summary box in the last day or so. The feature was developed in-house, using the multiple sources which Bing uses to identify flight-search pricing and trends.

The thinking goes like this: If Bing Travel can help travelers make informed decisions, then that will engender customer loyalty and deliver better-qualified leads to Bing’s supplier partners.

That’s the theory.

As with all these kinds of bells and whistles, the proof will be in the clicking.

With an agreement to buy ITA Software signed, Google’s Eric Schmidt isn’t saying whether the new flight-search product it intends to develop would be a metasearch offering.

In a conference call with analysts and press this afternoon, after news broke of the $700 million cash deal, the Google chairman and CEO said he can’t answer definitively what shape new flight-search tools would take.

But Schmidt indicated the product would include flight-option comparisons and that it would be different from anything available today.

ITA Software President and CEO Jeremy Wertheimer, who helped found the Cambridge, Mass., company in 1996, said it remains to be seen what direction the product would take, although the goal is a better flight-search experience.

Schmidt’s reference to flight-option comparisons, however, sounds a lot like the business that Kayak, Bing Travel, FareCompare, TripAdvisor, SkyScanner and a slew of other metasearch companies are engaged in.

Although ITA and Google handlers stated in the shadows that Google has ruled out becoming a transaction site for airline tickets, Schmidt didn’t dismiss the notion entirely, but called it “less likely.”

So with the deal that’s been rumored for months finally in the books, a lot of questions remain about the coming reverberations.

Schmidt said more than half of airline tickets are sold online, that he personally finds the air-ticket shopping experience frustrating and that it is “ultimately not a good user experience.”

Schmidt said Google looked at the air search experience and views it as  ”perfect for more innovation and more investment,” adding that Google, using ITA Software’s QPX technology, intends to build new flight-search tools, flight-option comparisons, and then deliver consumers to websites to buy their tickets.

Schmidt argued that the Google-ITA Software combination will benefit airlines and online travel agencies by delivering to them more and better leads.

So why would Google want to buy ITA rather than license its technology, as many metasearch players, airlines, online travel agencies, corporate booking tools and other distributors do?

Schmidt said Google did a technical evaluation and concluded that a deep integration of ITA and Google technologies would be needed to accomplish Google’s flight-search goals.

“So, it’s really a technical answer,” he said.

From ITA’s perspective, Wertheimer said he believes there is a lot more work to do to improve selling travel online, and Google will provide scale and a bunch of very bright people to work with.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said Google will develop new flight-search tools, including flight-tracking, and feed consumers to different sites for transactions.

For example, Mayer said consumers might be able to query, where might they fly within seven hours for a given fare.

Officials assured ITA’s partners that contracts will be honored.

Schmidt said he expects regulators to take a significant amount of time to review the transaction, and he believes the deal to be pro-competition and pro-consumer.

“We are pretty comfortable” about the likelihood of the deal getting approved, Schmidt said.

Schmidt acknowledged that Google had been talking to ITA for a long time and that he has known its management for an extended period.

“What they have achieved is amazing,” Schmidt said.

Here’s a replay of the conference call.

Kayak introduced a new map-based tool which enable users to search for flights, hotels and activities based on various parameters they establish.

Kayak Chief Marketing Officer Robert Birge says Kayak Explore has been operational for awhile and a link to it from more Kayak travel tools was established about a month ago.

Here’s what a Kayak Explore interactive map looks like with a search set up for flights from New York for $1,050 or less to beach destinations in Summer 2010.

If you select $800 flights to Greece, you can drill down, establish the dates for the trip and conduct a traditional Kayak search for flights.

Similarly, you can set up the range of prices you want to pay for a room, along with a star rating, and view icons for hotels that fit the bill in various parts of Greece.

The hotel map looks like this.

Exploring even further, you can select the Athens Atrium Hotel,  and conduct a traditional Kayak hotel search for Athens hotels, and check a box to ensure that the rates for the Athens Atrium Hotel appear on the top of the search results for comparison purposes. You also can check out reviews of the hotels from TravelPost, igoUgo and others.

Gadling appears to have broken the news about Kayak Explore this morning.

Birge says Kayak Explore is geared for users who are looking for a little inspiration about their travel plans. Perhaps they know their budget, but aren’t sure where they want to vacation.

“This is really for folks want to explore and look for inspiration for where they’d like to go,” Birge says.

Kayak had already implemented hotel search from maps, and Kayak Explore supplements that effort.

Travelers who already know they want to travel to Bermuda in August might want to use traditional Kayak search instead, Birge says.

Look for Kayak Explore to debut within Kayak’s iPad app soon, Birge says.

He adds that it “really looks cool” and “is kind of made for the iPad.”

ITA Software is working with “three or four” North American and European airlines which are experimenting with offering optional services in consumers’ initial air search — even before they select a flight.

Gianni Marostica, ITA’s chief commercial officer, says these airlines are experimenting with offering things like bag fees, onboard meals, overhead bin space, opera tickets, pillows and golf-tee times through ITA’s QPX shopping and pricing system as part of the initial flight search.

The carriers testing the service are major and hybrid airlines — i.e. low cost carriers starting to interline etc. — in North America and Europe, he says.

Marostica says ATPCO has established most of the standards necessary for airlines to offer these optional services and QPX, which has a 52% market share of flight searches in North America, has these capabilties, too.

“Essentially, there is no excuse that the technology isn’t ready,” Marostica says.

He says airlines are in the process of trying to figure out whether they want to offer these new products on their websites only or through the global distribution systems, as well.

Looking into his flight-search crystal ball, Marostica says airlines would be able to use ITA’s airline reservations system — which will be branded in three to four weeks — to create detailed passenger profiles through data-mining so carriers can create “individual fare products” to offer to segments of consumers during the initial flight search.

In other words, instead of airlines merely offering one-size-fits all fare families, groups of travelers who tend to purchase an economy-class ticket, an aisle seat, an onboard meal and a city tour on their vacations, for example, would be presented with an individual fare product prior to their ticket purchase.

This would mean airlines could merchandise directly to different sets of customers.

Marostica says ITA remains committed to building a new reservations system for airlines — despite the setback of Air Canada pulling out of the Polaris res system project with ITA last year.

“Every airline should change their res system at least once every 50 years,” he says, noting that many airlines’ legacy technologies are still TPF-based, and date to the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In fact, ITA established a sales and service office in Amsterdam last summer and “most likely” will open an office in Asia, both of which would help support ITA’s res system initiatives.

Asked about privately held ITA’s financial position, Marostica says ITA has been “profitable for quite some time” and its fiscal health is “fantastic.”

He wouldn’t comment directly on whether ITA is mulling an IPO.

But he sounds content with ITA’s current private status.

“I can say this: There is a lot of stuff you can get done as a private company that would tough to get done as a public company,” Marostica says.

ITA has been making investments in its products “and there are not many public companies that are able to take that risk,” he says.

Marostica adds: “Instead of managing the business on a short-term basis, you can manage it for the long term.”

So, it sounds like an IPO is not on ITA’s 2010 agenda, right?

“I didn’t say that,” he replied.

Australia-New Zealand online accommodation service Wotif is aiming to unsettle some of the biggest players in the region’s flight search and booking sector with the launch of WotFlight.

The new service launched today and is initially targeting domestic flights in and around Australia, with plans to expand into regional and long-haul flights over time.

Another flight search and booking system wouldn’t ordinarily capture huge amounts of attention, but the pedigree and experience behind the Wotif mothership is likely to make its new rivals in the airfare area take note.

Wotif.com launched in 2000 as an online distressed hotel inventory service, but quickly extended its booking time and global reach to challenge some of the biggest names in the Australasian region.

It is now one very few businesses to dominate a market instead of Expedia-owned TripAdvisor in accommodation rankings on Hitwise, courtesy of its running start and strong brand in Australia.

Wotif is currently almost 2% ahead of TripAdvisor in market share and 4% and 5% ahead of Booking.com and HotelClub respectively.

The new WotFlight brand is being touted as a “natural progression” for the wider group by its CEO Robbie Cookie.

Inevitably the two brands will work closely alongside each other as visitors to the new site will be offered accommodation vouchers on the sister site.

The fighting talk has already started, with brand manager Megan Magill claiming supremacy over content and functionality against its new rival in the flight search sector before the site even launches.

Webjet, Flight Centre and the Australian divisions of Expedia and lastminute.com currently top the Hitwise rankings in the agency categories.