On December 13, Groupon will offer two pairs of around the world (Northern Hemisphere only) economy class tickets for $10,000 and one pair of business class tickets for $20,000 through Delta Air Lines, Air France, KLM and Alitalia.

The tickets include up to 10 stopovers in North America, Europe and Asia plus three excursions (worth up to $500 each), all coordinated through a “Grouponcierge.”

The flight vouchers for travel, which must begin in a US city, need to be redeemed by December 12, 2012, with travel completed by November 8, 2013.

The Jet Set Adventure is part of Groupon’s Epic Deals program, which a Groupon spokesperson describes as “rare and incredible experiences giving you the chance to gift your friends and loved ones with memories and bragging rights for life.”

Such Epic Deals, the spokesperson says “pop up anywhere at anytime and are extremely limited in quantity,” can be found in the Grouponicus Holiday Shop.

There are a ton of terms and conditions to consider with the Jet Set Adventure.

And, as you are traveling in a “forward” direction only (no flying from the US to Europe and back to the US before you hit Asia, for instance) with a minimum of three stops and a maximum of 10, please pack light unless you take the business class option or want to add lots of bag fees.

On the other hand, if you are spending $10,000 for a couple of tickets, perhaps bag fees aren’t an issue.

Anyway, the economy class option includes only one free checked bag per person and “complimentary in-flight meals and snacks when available.”

And, you can definitely pack an extra pair of boots for the business class version of this “Jet Set Adventure” because you get two free checked bags per person in business class.

Groupon sees travel as a key focus in its expansion so why not promote some around the world flights for purchase as the holiday-gift buying frenzy is under way?

It is interesting that Groupon has chosen to partner with the four airlines for the around the world promotion and not with its seeming best-travel buddy, Expedia, which powers the hotel-oriented Groupon Getaways.

“This deal was specially curated for Grouponicus by Groupon’s Epic Deals team, which is separate from Groupon Getaways with Expedia,” the Groupon spokesperson says.

A previous Epic Deal revolved around the VIP Ellen DeGeneres experience.

There is nothing in the promotion verbiage about hotel bookings so apparently you are on your own as far as securing hotel bookings.

The Groupon spokesperson estimates that the discounts involved in the $10,000 and $20,000 flights amount to “about 50%.”

At any rate, as you are hop-scotching around the world, you’ll be eligible to accrue frequent flyer miles if you participate in the airlines’ mileage programs.

Depending on the particular itineraries chosen, these may not be the most high-yielding tickets for the airlines, after all, although the flights do have epic price tags.

The revamped service is part of a Euros 2 million investment programme to relaunch the travel vertical with hotels unveiled in July.

The company has already made some tweaks to the hotels service including maps and, says boss Chris Nixon, seen significant conversion as a result.

The team has also been working on localising its France and Italy versions of the hotels service which will make localisation of the flights much quicker although the UK service will be first.

Car hire is also in the pipeline and Nixon is currently considering the best route to bring package holidays onto the service.

He said a phone number based service was one potential option rather than a pure online play and the UK approach would be different to other countries.

“We might look at a white label initially in the UK.”

Nixon anticipates Kelkoo Travel will fully emerge from beta before the end of the year but says there are plans to cull some elements where the user-experience is not good.

Marketing plans will kick off next year including email CRM and Nixon says the company is still considering TV advertising.

“Until we get the site up and live with some traffic it’s difficult to see which channel is the best and in what country.”

For three-quarters of respondents location was important while almost two-thirds said the attractive appearance of a property was important.

Online reviews were also an influencing factor for 57% of consumers.

The report demonstrates the huge impact online has had on hotels with only about one in 10 consumers booking accommodation through a travel agent.

The overwhelming majority, 86%, are doing it themselves on the web and more than half are using price comparison sites.

InvisibleHand integrated car rental into its search widget last month and said there were plans to include major travel sites next.

Previously, the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County, handling Travelport v. American Airlines, had ordered that the the 2003 Orbitz-American Airlines charter associate agreement and Orbitz’s ticketing authority remain in place until another court order or Sept. 1, 2011, at the latest.

So, the latest agreement gives Orbitz and American Airlines at least three months or perhaps more to work out their dispute.

The July 29 agreement to extend American Airlines’ participation in Orbitz from Sept. 1 “into 2012″ — with no specific expiration date publicized — follows an announcement the same day by Travelport and American Airlines that they too would extend their GDS full content agreement beyond 2011. It had been slated to expire Aug. 31.

Here is the text of Orbitz Worldwide’s financial filing today about its new agreement with American Airlines”:

On July 29, 2011, Orbitz Worldwide, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. (the “Company”) and ultimate parent of Orbitz, LLC (“Orbitz”), entered into a Letter Agreement with American Airlines, Inc. (“AA”) (the “Letter Agreement”). The Letter Agreement extends the period over which AA is prohibited from terminating for convenience the Second Amended and Restated Airline Charter Associate Agreement dated December 19, 2003 between AA and Orbitz, and the Company’s ticketing authority, into 2012.

No detail was provided regarding whether the parties have resolved any of their differences over distribution economics and direct-connect technology or whether they have just agreed to extend their agreement and prolong negotiations.

American Airlines had removed its flights from Orbitz sites in December 2010, but reinstated them several months ago by court order.

The UK-based company is due to officially launch AnyTrip tomorrow, but the site has been up and running for a week and, according to ecommerce director Mats Diedrichsen, is a work-in-progress over the next 12 months.

AnyTrip is being pitched as a full travel site (rather than the budget accommodation-only mothership Hostelbookers), with flights, car hire and tours included from various white label providers.

Hostelbookers says it wants to compete not only in the budget accommodation sector (where its main rival is the Hostelworld giant) but also in the wider travel industry.

The white label providers are Isango (tours and activities), Skyscanner (flights) and CarTrawler (car hire).

The company’s existing accommodation providers will be feeding the hotel and hostel areas of the site.

“Orbitz is pursuing legal remedies to address Kayak’s promotion of certain travel information from other online travel websites’ in Kayak’s air, hotel and other paths,” says Orbitz Worldwide spokesman Brian Hoyt. “Orbitz believes these promotions violate Kayak’s contractual obligations to Orbitz.  We are confident that our contractual terms will be enforced through these channels.”

Kayak previously disclosed in the registration statement for its IPO that it is in arbitration with Orbitz over exclusivity provisions in Kayak’s core search results.

Kayak displays Expedia ads in flight and hotel search results on Kayak.com — and today began a beta test offering consumers for the first time in its history the option of booking hotels on Kayak.com.

Kayak gets that hotel inventory from Travelocity in a white label deal.

Previously, Kayak handled no bookings itself, but transferred consumers to supplier and OTA sites.

Travelocity’s name doesn’t appear in the new Book Kayak.com option, but is the merchant of record in the transactions and handles customer service duties.

Hoyt declined to elaborate on the Orbitz statement about “pursuing legal remedies” but it appears to mean something beyond the previously disclosed arbitration proceedings.

Kayak declined to comment on the Orbitz statement.

I just saw an alpha version of the Montreal-based startup, Hopper, which bills itself as a “full-text search engine for travel” and is another travel business formed by former Expedia brainiacs.

Co-founded by Frederic Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk, both of whom worked at one point in the online travel agency’s hotel group, Hopper has been in stealth mode since 2007, and is ready to come out into the light a bit.

The company views itself as a B2B alternative to Google-ITA Software.

But first, a big disclaimer about this post: Hopper CEO Lalonde is also chairman of Tnooz.

Hopper takes natural language queries and returns organic results plus what it says are the best flight options in less than a second.

The speed is definitely part of the “wow” factor here (and more on that later).

So, for example, you start a search for “cities in spain” and retrieve the following organic results along with flights and fares from Seattle to Madrid, Granada, Barcelona and Bilbao for two weeks from late March to mid-April.  Here’s what the results page looks like:

Notice, in the above example there was no need to insert travel dates or airport codes and, for now at least, the results were returned in a fraction of the time it would take to execute a flight search on Expedia or Kayak. As a next step, you can insert departure and return dates and compare flights from multiple airports.

If you refine your search to “cities in Spain with the best beaches,” then Hopper retrieves organic results ranking the best beaches and produces a different set of matching flights. Here’s an image of the page:

The Hopper search engine doesn’t just rank destination cities, but also ranks golf courses (or other pursuits) as in this query for “golf in costa del sol.”

And, the search engine also searches multiple airports, shown on a Google Map, to find the best flights within a reasonable distance of the destination as in this search result for Estepona, one of the top golf courses that came up in the previous “golf in costa del sol” search. Here’s a screen shot:

For now, the Hopper alpha is loaded up with Spain data only and flight information from Seattle to airports in Spain.

A very small sample of the world, indeed.

As a travel planning tool, Hopper can search topics such as “running of the bulls” or “picasso” and return destination information and flights.

The main advances appear to be in Hopper’s ability to sort natural language queries and produce travel-relevant results paired with flight information, and with seeming precedent-setting speed.

Hopper claims it will be able to do this not just with flights, but also for hotels and cars etc.

Google, of course, is not a travel-specific search engine (or doesn’t have one yet, at least) so perhaps the comparison is unfair, but here’s what you get today from a “cities in Spain” search using Google.

The top result is for the lost city of Atlantis, hardly a tourism destination unless you are a very proficient scuba diver.

Lalonde, who sold Newtrade Technologies to Expedia in 2002 and then went to work on hotel supplier strategy for the OTA, feels Hopper can be a Google-ITA alternative and plans to market it as a solution to online travel agencies and other travel businesses.

Lalonde is currently on a shopping spree, buying hundreds — if not thousands — of computers to scale up the enterprise, and feels confident that Hopper can maintain its sub-one-second response times — a feat that remains to be seen as the database grows. Hopper uses Big Data technology to crunch mammoth data sets with haste.

In defense of the sub-second queries, Lalonde points out that the “cities in Spain” query met that timeframe and produced more than 53,000 results.

Lalonde is convinced that Google must have a broadly similar solution in mind once — or if — it gets to integrate ITA Software.

Perhaps Andrew Silverman, senior product manager at Google, previewed some of Google’s vision in a Tnooz guest post in November 2010.

Silverman wrote:

“Today’s travel websites work okay if you’re looking for a flight from city A to city B on a specific date, but not if you’re searching for ‘fly to an island location at a time when it’s usually good weather for less than $500.’ We don’t know what these new tools will look like yet — and can’t, until we can close this acquisition and begin working with ITA.  But some critics apparently think consumers should be satisfied with the status quo.”

Lalonde believes that Google isn’t trying to buy ITA to introduce incremental changes to flight-search results, but may have a new search paradigm in development.

Whether Google does it or tiny Hopper takes a whack at it, this kind of new travel search will be a big challenge for OTAs, metasearch and other travel businesses.

Hopper, too, would need “real integration” of its airfare data — and not just an API — to meet its goals and Lalonde says he’s working on that.

For now, Hopper gets its flight results from Expedia.

Lalonde says Hopper, which consists of a small team based in Montreal, is currently in closed alpha testing. The homepage is soliciting Facebook “likes” and Twitter follows for an invite.

The company, which is staffed by more than a handful of ex-Expedia geeks, has raised some $2 million in funding from Brightspark Ventures.

Here’s an image of Kayak results for a Newark, N.J. to Knoxville, Tenn., query for March 21 to March 29. It shows results from USAirways.com, CheapTickets.com [owned by Orbitz Worldwide] and Expedia.com:

Notice that US Airways and CheapTickets show $528 fares while Expedia merely displays “check rates.” If you click “Go” for Expedia.com or select “See all price details” and then “click to see rates” for Expedia, you navigate to Expedia.com, which displays US Airways flights for $527.81.

Kayak considers the Expedia placement an advertisement while US Airways and CheapTickets are distribution partners.

Advertisements come and go and Expedia’s flight search ads are back on Kayak despite an Expedia statement March 7 that it had temporarily stopped investing in Kayak’s core flight search results.

An Expedia spokesman labeled its return to Kayak flight search results as “just day-to-day business.  It’s an ongoing process dependant on all sorts of factors (e.g. Expedia site conversion rates, CPC rates, etc.”

Orbitz, however, apparently doesn’t appreciate the distinction between distribution relationships and advertising partnerships on Kayak.

Orbitz believes it enjoys certain exclusivity rights in Kayak’s U.S. flight search results, and alleges the Expedia ads violate a 2009 agreement with Kayak.

Kayak and Orbitz have submitted the dispute to arbitration.

Of Expedia’s reappearance in Kayak flight search results, Orbitz spokesman Brian Hoyt reiterated a March 7 statement on the topic.

“We continue to have an important marketing partnership with Kayak and believe any existing disputes will be resolved to uphold our exclusivity provisions within our business agreements,” Hoyt said.

Kayak declined to comment, citing confidentiality provisions in supplier relations.

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.