The Orbitz hotel shopping path just became a little metasearch-like.

Orbitz added a bunch of tools — Google Maps with real-time room rates, and filters and sliders based on star ratings, reviewer scores, amenities and hotel chains – which enable consumers to view the initial search results and then to do comparison shopping for other hotels.

The tools resemble some you’d find on a metasearch website and represent a twist for an online travel agency.

In fact, Orbitz says it “is the first major online travel website to enable detailed side-by-side property comparison upfront on the initial hotel search results page.”

The big difference, however, is that consumers will be doing all of their comparison shopping on Orbitz and not, as with metasearch, on a variety of supplier websites.

So, when you search for hotels in Cleveland, Ohio, Orbitz serves up its traditional display of search results, but then in the left navigation pane, you’ll find Google Maps with hotel pricing and all of the sliders and filtering tools. It looks like this:

When enlarged, the map offers satellite and terrain views.

In the Cleveland hotel search example, if you don’t like the initial search results or want to comparison shop, one way of doing so would be to click on $89 on the Google Map, and you will see a box with information about the Country Inn & Suites by Carlson Davenport. Here it is:

Notice that you see the base room rate, the total price including “taxes and fees,” the reviewer score, links to more hotel details and a Google Street View of the property. When you click the Select button, you begin the booking process for that property.

The introduction of comparison shopping tools in initial hotel search results represents another leading move for Orbitz in its hotel search experience.

Orbitz was the first online travel agency in the U.S. to introduce Hotel TotalPrice in initial hotel search results, and to offer Hotel Price Assurance.

The jury is out, however, on what these series of new tools will mean for the Orbitz hotel business and whether they will translate into concrete gains.

Kayak is aggressively testing alternatives to ITA Software’s QPX solution for air shopping and pricing, according to industry sources.

Kayak has been checking out offerings from Expedia, Amadeus, Travelport, Sabre and Vayant, industry sources say.

All of the above companies offer products that they would hold up as alternatives to QPX, although Expedia and Sabre haven’t been aggressive in commercializing their offerings.

It doesn’t appear that Kayak is making any imminent moves to replace ITA Software, which is just one of the solutions it uses to access air content and pricing.

Google has pledged to maintain ITA Software’s contracts if its pending acquisition of ITA Software wins approval and closes.

But, Kayak certainly isn’t alone in weighing possible replacements.

In one way, news that Kayak is testing other companies’ products would not be an unwelcome development for ITA Software and Google.

They are anxious to prove that the acquisition is not anticompetitive so the more viable other vendors’ products seem to be, the easier sell the marriage would be to regulators.

Make way for another flight metasearch offering in the U.S. — Zugu.

Cheapflights Media quietly unveiled the beta this week for Zugu US after launching Zugu UK in February and Zugu DE in April.

For Cheapflights, the move represents a product expansion from its traditional deal-publishing business into the live inventory realm of flight metasearch.

If some people say flight metasearch is dead, you’d never know it from the flurry of activity.

For example, this week Cheapflights opened the curtain on Zugu US while Fly.com launched in Germany.

In May, Travelport bought Singapore-based Sprice.

Also in May, Kayak brought Germany’s Swoodoo into the fold.

U.S. travel metasearch is a crowded field, too, so how will Zugu differentiate itself?

Meredith Hanrahan,  Cheapflights Media’s chief marketing officer, says Zugu will be different because of its “sleek elegant display,” its ease of use and comprehensiveness.

Zugu also intends to let the world now — in some way as yet undisclosed — that it is a really fun brand.

A TV and social media campaign will be coming out “sooner rather than later,” Hanrahan says.

So, here’s the clean-looking homepage:

And, here’s an example of a Zugu US flight-results page:

For clarity purposes, in the top result the cheapest flight from Priceline, for example, is highlighted in orange and in the same grid users can see there are higher-priced flights from CheapOair.

One interesting thing that Zugu does is enable users to sort the results not just by airlines, but by online travel agencies, as well.

And, sliders at the top of the display enable travelers to filter results by flight times, flight durations and number of stops.

Cheapflights, which operates in eight countries and has some 8 million unique visitors, uses a CPC revenue model.

Zugu, on the other hand, uses a transaction model based on cost per acquisition.

Hanrahan says Zugu accesses flight inventory from GDSs and through Cheapflights’ pre-existing array of direct feeds from airlines.

The beta period for Zugu US — the name has German origins and roughly means “ready to migrate” — should last 6-8 weeks, she says.

From there, Zugu will migrate, or transition, into a full launch.

Fly.com’s delayed beta launch in Germany quietly took place this week.

Travelzoo’s metasearch offering initially had been projected to arrive in Germany in late March and then was to be unveiled within a few weeks.

Here’s an image of the Fly.com site in Germany. Notice that the Google ads in the image below appear in English because I accessed the Germany site from the U.S. The Google ads appear in German in Germany.

So, Fly.com now has a presence in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany and it’s on track to plant roots in the same European countries where it’s parent company, Travelzoo, has a presence.

The URL for the Germany site is http://www.fly.com/de/.

Fly.com Deutschland — and Fly.com UK — still use a U.S.-style calendar, where the first day of the week begins on a Sunday. Here’s a screenshot from the Germany site:

In contrast, Kayak’s Swoodo, for example, goes with the conventional European calendar display with the week beginning on a Monday, like this:

Glitches like these for Fly.com’s German-speaking customers could be a big turn-off and may accentuate the fact that the site is a U.S. import.

There are probably some slight differences between the three websites — in addition to the languages and default currencies — but the templates are similar.

However, one difference is that the U.S. Fly.com website gives users the ability to search for roundtrip, one-way and multi-city flights, while the Germany and U.K. sites offer return and one-way only.

Both the U.K and Germany sites offer flights from major carriers as well as low-cost airlines, including Ryanair, easyJet, Air Berlin and others.

Amadeus has started to roll out its new fare and pricing tools.

This includes several components: Basic Fare Storage; Fare Quotation, Pricing Engine; Fare-based results search; and Fare+Availability Caching.

Basic Fares and Pricing has been enhanced over the years.

Amadeus was unique when it launched Basic Fares and Pricing in deploying a separate fares and pricing engine using the old Unisys-based systems. This brought more flexibility than the integrated Fares and Pricing tools of the pure IBM TPF-based solutions. Amadeus was therefore able to deploy a more flexible private fare system — Amadeus Nego — than the other GDSs, although it was not as functionally differentiated.

In announcing the new platform [pdf] Amadeus says it took a four-year effort. Clearly Amadeus has developed a lot of learning along the way and seem to be putting it to good use.

Fares and Pricing generally is a very imprecise service offering. It is very hard to get things right. The complexity of the solutions are mind- boggling. Implementing the fare rules and then trying to mix and match them to availability has been a long-term problem that for specific itineraries.

Travel Agents were almost always better than automated solutions. However, human agents with these good skills are becoming a relatively rare commodity and of course they don’t scale very well.

The emergence of the Internet in the late 1990s resulted in adaptations of the traditional GDS-based core architecture. Amadeus benefited from its earlier major activity in things  like itinerary-based tools. But like its fellow GDS competitors, Amadeus continued through the last decade to adapt rather then re-write the systems. Worldspan (now part of Travelport) partnered with Expedia/Microsoft to develop a new generation of tools that were more in tune with the needs of online travel agency players. Sabre rewrote its fares application system to take it off the TPF host. However, all of them have had mixed fortunes in serving accurate online search results.

The reluctance of the GDSs to fulfill the demands of the OTAs and metasearch players — or indeed any search-results requirement for even single airline caching systems — created opportunities for companies like ITA Software to emerge. It is interesting to note that ITA was actually the beneficiary of this reluctance.

Indeed, Amadeus took an 18% shareholding early in ITA’s life, hoping to ensure that if ITA was successful, then it would benefit the core Amadeus platform. However, the relationship never matured and acrimoniously ended a few years ago.

Taking a lot of lessons from its original MasterPricer tool, Amadeus has upgraded it and given it a lot more capability. The new platform has more new names, and Amadeus is doing a great job in creating a degree of confusion. So far, the Master Pricer flavors  are as follows: Travelboard, Calendar, Special Offer and Agent Fare Families.

Among the new capabilities:

Master Pricer Standard is being replaced by Master Pricer Travel Board. This is essentially the first implementation of Amadeus’s new fares and pricing platform architecture and any advanced features will only be available from the new platform. New commercial terms apply so it is important for users to ensure that they are going to be able to keep their costs under control for these new options because — make no mistake –this is not a free upgrade.

In Master Pricer Travel Board the ability to invoke different search parameters is now possible. Amadeus has changed the basic algorithm in the tool to include more user definition, but also to add more price-friendly parameters rather than just availability and trip types alone. This will increase the inclusion of options such as 3-leg and multi-carrier solutions.

Cautions

Don’t assume the tool is completely definable by the user platform. Companies sometimes do this to prevent the user from hurting themselves. It will mean that users will need to undertake a strong degree of experimentation in the new platform.

As noted above, the cost to use the tool will rise, and therefore there will need to perform a cost-benefit analysis to ensure that the engine doesn’t start becoming a cash siphon.

The new capabilities are generic in nature, but just about all Master Pricer users, including OTAs and agents, can benefit from the tool. The new architecture is not entirely customer-serving. There is clearly a desire by Amadeus to reduce some of the wasted transactions and higher-cost items where that cost is not directly recoverable in user fees.

Whether the new platform is better at addressing the vagaries of airline-based point of sale and dynamic availability will be a critical element in determining the quality and ultimately the overall success of the solution.

And, it remains to be seen whether the tool will improve the quality of the results. A constant criticism of the current platform has been inaccurate results being returned with certain taxes and service fees ignored.

Competition

The market  for the first time is seeing competition from both the traditional GDSs and also the fare tool vendors. ITA is clearly a target here as would Expedia’s Best Fares Search if it decides to commercialize it. The new solutions from Everbread and Vayant also become targets.

In general, the trend demonstrates the how important the search process has become to the overall workflow. The user community at large (both traditional and online) now has some real options in GDS and independent solutions. Clearly, the legacy GDSs are feeling the heat from the next gen platform providers such as Farelogix, LUTE and Everbread. The airlines will be wanting to see if this new architecture is airline-friendly or not. If the latter, then you can assume to see a lot of talk about the results being “unsellable.”

The jury will be out for a long time to determine if Amadeus’s new platform does the job.

But make no mistake: Amadeus is in this for the long haul and it is going to do whatever it takes to ensure it has a competitive product. This is going to suck a lot of resources internally.

Can the giant move at the same speed as the new players? That remains to be seen.

Only the market — provided it is freely allowed to — will decide.

UK travel metasearch site TravelSupermarket confirmed big falls across its key performance indicators this morning as the economic outlook showed little sign of improvement in Q1 2010.

Results released as part of parent company MoneySupermarket’s six month interims for the first half of 2010 indicated a 20% drop in revenue for the travel division.

The company publishes results for a number of key indicators across its channels (money, insurance, travel, home services).

For TravelSupermarket:

Officials say:

“In what remains a challenging market, with consumers managing discretionary expenditure tightly, the group has continued to manage the business for margin in the first half of the year and in particular has minimised its marketing costs. Consequently visitors to most channels within the travel vertical were lower than in the same period last year.”

The company intends to manage the travel vertical in a similar manner over the short term, but plans are in place for improvements in the second half of 2010.

The group will devote some development resource “in improving the product proposition” in some of TravelSupermarket’s channels (hotels, flights etc).

The effort is to ensure TravelSupermarket remains “well placed to compete” when the travel market returns to normal levels in the future, officials predict.

Kayak is celebrating 170,000+ downloads of its iPad application in little under three months by throwing its also well received Explore tool into the system.

The release of the map-driven search tool on Kayak in May 2010 draw plenty of praise in the consumer tech world, although industry watchers will have seen some similarities between it and the Amadeus Affinity Shopper, Cartrawler’s project with Nokia and others.

One criticism of map-based search tools is that sometimes the enjoyment of browsing a large map is often lost through the use of a mouse and on the web.

Throwing the tool onto a touch and full-screen device such as the iPad may have fixed some of the those concerns.

Chief marketing officer Robert Birge says a new hotel search system for the Kayak iPad app is also due to be released in the coming months.

French travel search and content provider EasyVoyage is attempting to cement a stronger position in the UK by partnering with The Independent newspaper.

The company will provide search tools for flights, hotels and car hire as part of a white label deal with the Indy.

The search modules will feature on the travel and business landing pages on the Indy website as well as a larger portal-style search page which also features pre-populated hotel links to the most popular destinations.

The results pages will feature the same filtering tools available on the existing EasyVoyage website. EasyVoyage has a similar white label deal with Le Monde in France.

The partnership comes eight months after EasyVoyage secured a funding round of Euro 31.6 million in what was said to be the fifth biggest technology investment up until October 2009.

At the time the company reigned its projection of a UK top five finish by the end of 2009 for its 10-month old site and said instead it expected a top ten placing during the first quarter of 2010 – something it has also failed to achieve so far this year, according to weekly Hitwise data.

The metasearch company said  it would use the money as a warchest for new acquisitions around Europe after launching a number of country sites around the continent over the past few years.

A site for the German market launched in November 2009.

When the Google-ITA Software deal was first mooted in late-April 2010, Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi appeared to reasonably relaxed about the whole thing.

First of all, Khosrowshahi hinted that Orbitz, not Expedia, should be more worried about any potential deal as it relies on ITA’s QPX system for flight search.

“From our standpoint, we don’t feel too exposed,” he said at the time.

Fast forward a few more weeks and Khosrowshahi sharpened his view ever so slightly, claiming “it’s not something we are particularly worried about” if Google continues to work with advertisers in the manner it traditionally has done so.

But since the deal was announced on July 1 and the ramifications explored and pored over intensely, darker clouds have appeared over the Bellevue, Washington-based Expedia Inc.

Chairman of both the Expedia board and also former parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp, Barry Diller, now says the planned acquisition of ITA is “disturbing” in the general overview of Google moving into vertical markets.

Speaking to the UK’s Financial Times [registration required], Diller says:

“It is a dangerous step because it is inevitably going to cause problems with customers and regulatory authorities.”

Diller goes as far to say the deal is a “full frontal assault on a core area of the internet life” – no doubt drawing reference to Google’s – until now, it appears – holier than thou ethos to sit in a neutral position in terms of travel search.

He goes on to say that the deal should either be killed by the regulators or conditions imposed. This is clearly a substantial ramping up of disquiet over the deal from the lukewarm comments earlier from Khosrowshahi.

Diller is by far the most high profile figure in the travel industry to wade in with a less than favourable reaction to the deal after many – including Expedia-owned TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer – sat quietly on the fence.

Perhaps his comments will trigger others to follow suit (especially in the light of how some believe OTAs as well as metasearch engines are watching developments closely, and nervously).

Skyscanner, the U.K.-based travel metasearch website, signed an ad representation deal with Travel Ad Network for the North American market.

Travel Ad Network will be handling display, behavioral and lead-generation ad products for U.S. and Canadian suppliers for Skyscanner, says Scott Cherkin, vice president of business and product development for Travel Ad Network.

The move is part of Skyscanner’s overall strategy to assign resources into growing its U.S. audience in 2010.

Skyscanner spokeswoman Lara Bayley says the metasearch company has named a U.S. country manager, Scot Carlson, who’s assignment is to “scale our audience and develop commercial relationships.”

Skyscanner currently has some two dozen country sites, which are available in more than 20 languages.

Travel Ad Network says it will be able to integrate North American advertisers’ airline pricing into Skyscanner’s metasearch results in North America “as well as the Skyscanner global footprint.”

Skyscanner launched its U.S. .com domain last year, but Bayley says “we have long had a strong U.S. customer base the .net site as Skyscanner was developed to work at a multinational level from the very start.”