Hotels have been struggling for years to get consumers to come directly to them rather than various OTAs, middlemen and aggregators to whom they pay affiliate booking and lead fees. This is not the first such hotels joint venture effort. There have been several initiatives over the past decade that have met with limited or mixed success.

The functionality and design of the Roomkey site are very good. It’s not clear Roomkey is comprehensive enough to be truly competitive, however. For example, there are no consumer reviews and users don’t see all available hotels in a market.

Higher profile sites such as TripAdvisor, Kayak, Orbitz and numerous other “booking engines” represent formidable competition. Google itself is now showing hotel rooms and pricing.

According to Hitwise, Google Maps is the internet’s top travel site. Following the acquisition of travel booking platform ITA last year, Google has been incrementally rolling out more travel search features and capabilities.

You can imagine my surprise when I saw my local airport — Pasco (PSC) — showing up in Google’s flight search feature. Don’t get me wrong; I love this airport … from car to gate in less than 10 minutes just can’t be beat. But that’s the point: It’s a pretty small airport and Google’s flight search has been limited to much bigger cities since its launch in September.

Not anymore. Google is remaining tightlipped about exact numbers, but a spokesperson did confirm for us via email that “since launch we’ve more than doubled the number of domestic (i.e., U.S.) routes available in the feature.”

Note that they’re talking about the doubling of routes, not airports. For example, some smaller airports in my area are not included yet: Yakima (YKM), Wenatchee (EAT) and Walla Walla (ALW), for example. Still, if they have routes from my local airport, it seems safe to assume that even smaller ones are in line for showing up in Google flight search eventually.

In case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal has a story out about how Google’s travel results — added in September, rather than December as the story says, have upset (as you’d expect) rival travel search engines such as Kayak, Expedia and Orbitz.

Bing: Pushing Travel Search Against Google Since 2009

You have to get midway down into the story to find any mention of Bing doing exactly the same thing:

Microsoft’s Bing, which has less than a quarter of Google’s audience, also places its flight-search tool atop search results.

That’s all you get, too. There’s no mention of any of the travel sites being upset with Bing, perhaps finding this unfair or having gone on for literally years before Google did the same.

There’s also no mention that Bing has used having its own travel search results as a way to position itself as better than Google, an important fact in any debate on this issue.

Soon after Bing launched in 2009, the ads about its travel search began airing:

Click here to view the embedded video.

From the ad:

You’re planning a trip. First stop, Bing. ‘Cause any search engine can help you find a plane ticket. But Bing, with Price Predictor, can help make sure you don’t pay too much.

To me, this seems pretty relevant. Travel search is an area where Google’s top search competitor, Bing, has repeatedly poked at Google being behind over the years. Indeed, when Bing launched, it effectively called out Google as not offering strong enough vertical search results in this area. From the Bing launch press release:

Microsoft’s research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions.

The current state of Internet search isn’t optimized for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios.

For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision.

In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.

I’ve bolded the key parts here. This competitive battle seems just as relevant as concerns that travel search engines have with Google’s new travel search. It seems necessary background to provide. But that’s not given, even though the Wall Street Journal itself talked about this in July:

In fact, some analysts see Google’s move into travel as a direct reaction to the offerings at Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Some of Bing’s features, like travel search, “have put some pressure on Google” to innovate, wrote Douglas Anmuth at Barclays Capital.

Kayak: Do As I Said, Not As I Do To Others On Bing

As for who exactly is upset, only Kayak gets quoted with slams against Google. Kayak doesn’t have any slams against Bing, perhaps because it partnered with Bing in May to help it do exactly what it doesn’t like Google doing to other travel search engines.

Also not mentioned is how in March, Kayak’s chief technical officer dismissed concerns about Google entering the travel search space.

About The “No Links” Issue

It is interesting to read how Google isn’t linking to other travel search engines with the search tool itself, something it apparently promised to do but isn’t required to. From the WSJ article:

While Google wasn’t required by the DOJ to link directly to the travel sites, it emphasized that it would “build tools that drive more traffic to airline and online travel agency sites.” Competitors say that Google is now violating the spirit of that commitment.

Google acknowledges it has failed to make good on assurances it would link to the travel sites, but the company says it had no choice. “The airlines told us that they would not give us [travel data] if we provided booking links to” online travel agencies, Jeremy Wertheimer, ITA’s founder and now a Google vice president, said at an online travel conference last month.

He added that Google still wants to include travel sites, and “we’ll keep knocking on that door to see if things change.” A Google spokesman declined further comment.

To be clear, Google is still linking to other major travel search engines in its main search results. Links, as best I understand, just don’t appear in the travel OneBox at the top of the page:

Links do appear below the OneBox, just as they do at Bing, though Bing’s travel search box takes up far less room:

So Google is linking, just like Bing does, to other travel search engines. What exactly is, then, this promise that it’s not delivering on, which is a key allegation featured in the Wall Street Journal piece?

I had to dig back to find it here from this Google blog post of October 2010:

Our goal is to build tools that drive more traffic to airline and online travel agency sites where customers can purchase tickets. We also believe that giving users better ways to search for flights online will encourage more users to make their flight purchases online, which will create more overall online sales for airlines and travel agencies. Google does not plan to sell airline tickets directly.

Wanted: Free Links From Within Travel Search

If you take the new travel search feature as being a new “tool,” then yes, it clearly fails to drive traffic to them to allow booking, at least for free. That’s because when you actually do a search, and go to book, only direct booking is provided through the airlines:

In the example above, you can see how selecting the “Book” button only allows booking through American Airlines — and only because, as best I can tell, American is paying to have that happen (hence the ad being shown).

Now if you really want to be bothered about the Google tool, this is where you should get upset. When you hit the help pages about Google Flight Search, it doesn’t suggest that the only reason airlines appear is because they pay:

In some cases, we may be unable to connect you directly with a vendor to purchase your ticket and as a result, the Book button will be inactive. If this happens, you should repeat your search on the airline website, or, particularly in the case of a multi-airline flight, repeat your search with an online travel agent.

Potentially, only including booking links if being paid for them is a violation of the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines on paid inclusion (see Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines? for more about this). It’s hard to say, because the airline’s route is listed without payment, so it’s not exactly a case of paid inclusion.

But more important, look here:

The first arrow shows what happens if (as I assume) an airline doesn’t pay to have the Book link enabled. You’re told to contact the airline directly.

The second arrow shows that the travel search tool does send traffic to the non-Google travel search engines. There’s an ad at the bottom of every page I do listing them. I assume they’re paying to be there, and if they don’t pay, then they wouldn’t show up.

Of course, for them to show up for free would be a nice boon to have. And for consumers, it would probably be nice as well, since the tool’s booking feature seems to be pretty weak.

At Bing, Kayak Locks Out Competitors From Free Listings

The booking feature at Bing is much more robust, but that’s pretty easy to explain. The results are all from Kayak:

To recap. Kayak gets quoted in a Wall Street Journal story upset that Google doesn’t link to it for free within Google’s flight search tool, saying that Google has an:

“explicit policy to intercept general search queries with their products,” and therefore, “their argument that they’re not engaging in anticompetitive practices doesn’t hold up to basic logic”

But when the same exact thing happens at Bing, except in favor of Kayak and only blocking Kayak’s competitors from being listed for free, that’s apparently OK. Or not, at least, worth a mention.

Search Engine & Transactions: An Industry Issue

The more that search engines start diving into providing direct transactions or being transaction brokers, especially where they might charge providers a fee through ads or by taking a share of sales, the more any publisher should be concerned.

But that problem isn’t a Google-specific one and shouldn’t be treated in that manner. Otherwise, potential abuses by Google get stopped but others are free to do the same.

Related Links

• Google AdSense Radio Ads & Microsoft Bing Travel TV Commercial
• Kayak Welcomes Google As Travel Search Competitor, With ITA Acquisition Still Under DOJ Review
• Bing Travel & Kayak Announce Partnership
• Gov’t To Okay Google-ITA Deal After Google Agrees To Burdensome Conditions
• Google Travel Search Takes Flight With First ITA Travel Product
• Google Makes Flight Search Results Better Looking, More Useful
• Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?
• Google Launches Comparison Ads, Starting With Mortgages
• Google To Acquire BeatThatQuote.com
• Google Tests Its Hotel Finder As A New Comparison Ad Atop Search Results
• Dear Congress: It’s Not OK Not To Know How Search Engines Work, Either
• Bing Bans Holiday Deals Sites, Including One By Group That Created Cyber Monday
• Banned Holiday Deal Sites Return To Bing

For example, two weeks ago, Wolfram|Alpha launched a new real-time flight tracking feature that displays information about flights flying close to your own location.

I’m a major Wolfram|Alpha user and supporter. However, since Wolfram is using GeoIP, which approximates location rather than using something more precise like GPS coordinates or ADS-B data (more on that below), accuracy can be a problem.

So here are several additional specialty web sites and mobile tools that provide both near real-time and historical data for tracking flights.

FlightAware

The web version of FlightAware is my all-time favorite resource for air traffic info, primarily for flights in the U.S. and Canada, or flights to and from both nations, though more and more data for flights, airlines and airports around the world are becoming available from FlightAware. Not only can you map many flights in the air (data is anywhere from real-time to delayed five minutes), but you can also slice and dice the data in a number of ways. The company has been around for more than five years.

For example:

• Flights headed to and from a specific airport
• Minute by minute air speed and lat/long
• Real time flight cancellations
• Flights in the air by type of aircraft
• Flights in the air by carrier

FlightAware provides some historical info for free. You can access even more if you’re a registered user (free) and, as you might expect, even more for a fee. They also offer a number of business services and open source software.

Also, I encourage you to take a look at the lengthy FAQ. It answers a lot of questions including where the data comes from.

Flight Aware Mobile

Apps are available for five different mobile device platforms as well as a mobile optimized site.

Since many mobile devices have GPS built in, FlightAware (and other apps) offer a “nearby” feature that provides much more precise info about planes nearby compared to what’s available using GeoIP (what Wolfram|Alpha uses).

Plane Finder

This service from pinkfroot provides air traffic info for flights globally, and the service is especially useful for flights outside of the U.S.

Plane Finder uses data sent directly from planes equipped with ADS-B technology monitored by ground stations. For more on how ADS-B works see Plane Finder FAQ and this extensive Wikipedia entry.

Plane Finder offers a free, near-real-time map at Planefinder.net. If nothing else, this free resource is great eye candy and will likely wow them in your office or at family events. The plane icons representing flight paths move as planes move.

Also, with two clicks you can begin tracking a flight using Google Earth.

One note: Plane Finder does not provide departure and arrival times.

Pinkfroot offers Plane Finder apps (fee-based) for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone.

Finally, pinkfroot offers Plane Finder AR for iPad.

This is one super cool app. You can point iPad camera-phone at a plane in the sky or on the ground at an airport. If it’s transmitting the ADS-B, you’ll get details about the plane and flight. In other words, flight tracking plus augmented reality.

More Apps To Track Flights

Two additional aviation apps to mention.

First, Flightwise Tracker Pro (iOS). This free app does not provide arrival and departure times but does near real-time info using several types of maps, weather, a limited amount of historical data, nearby flight info, pictures of the aircraft, and aircraft registration information for some planes (although this feature will hopefully improve).

Second, FlightTrack, FlightTrack Pro, and FlightBoard.

These apps are available for several platforms from Mobiata, a company that was acquired by Expedia in 2010. They’re all excellent resources that look great and are worth the price. I love the many ways you can receive flight alerts from FlightTrack (and the company has a sense of humor—many alerts are accompanied by the familiar “ding” sound that you hear when you press a flight attendant call button on a commercial flight).

My favorite Mobiata app is FlightBoard. This app provides arrival and departure information (real-time) for flights at more than 1,400 airports around the world. It also looks great. In fact, its design is based in part on the flight information boards at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.

Listening Live To Pilots & Air Traffic Controllers

A visit to LiveATC.net (they also have iOS and Android apps and mobile-optimized site) provides links to aviation radios in locations around world. An online archive of all recordings is available for 50 days after a flight.

One final thought: These resources are fantastic for educators wanting to enhance geography, social studies, and math lesson plans—kids of all ages will love tracking flights in real time.

The display could be expanded to reveal flight schedule information. However that wasn’t very pretty or useful, especially compared with other travel verticals such as Kayak or Orbitz.

Today however Google is rolling out an improved display for supported cities that includes schedules and price information. It brings some of the “portal” functionality into search results.

In the Google.com/flights area, you select your desired legs and then click through to book directly on the airline’s site.

Presumably that capability will now be brought directly to the Google SERP — although the new functionality isn’t yet live for me so I can’t confirm whether or not that’s a correct assumption.

It’s rolling out now and but only in the US for the immediate time being.

To access this literal, real-time flight search, just type “flights overhead” into the Wolfram Alpha search box, and voilá! If you’re using a desktop computer, Wolfram Alpha does its best to figure out your location automatically and — if there are flights in the sky above you — lists the commercial flights in the area. You’ll also see the planes’ altitude and angle against the horizon, how far away they are and the aircraft type.

Clicking on any of the flight titles gives more details — I can learn, for example, that American Airlines Flight 621 flies between Seattle and Dallas/Fort Worth. (This flight is probably a lot closer to Dallas right now than what Wolfram Alpha is showing me. I live in a rural area and we don’t get a ton of overhead flights, so it may be defaulting to show flights that have been overhead; those of you in more populated areas will probably have better real-time results than me.)

Chances are good that you have a solid roof over your head, so desktop search probably isn’t the primary use case here. You’ll probably be somewhere outside with a smartphone or mobile device and want to know where that airplane above you is going. And thankfully, the same search query works just fine on the mobile version of Wolfram Alpha. Here’s an iPhone screenshot, and I’m not using the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app — just the regular Safari browser.

Obviously, a couple flights left the skies above me between the time I did the desktop and iPhone screenshots. Not shown, but further down the page (on both desktop and mobile) is a sky map showing the same flights in a more visual way.

Wolfram Alpha’s blog post says you can also use this feature to find out things like what you were looking at when you shot a photo out the window of your airplane in mid-flight.

This super awesome, literal, real-time flight search is available for U.S. searches only. And since the data comes from the Federal Aviation Administration, it only works on searches for flights that have at least one endpoint in the U.S.

Seriously, when I was a kid, every time I saw a plane in the sky above me I wondered where it came from and where it was going. I’ll probably start wondering the same thing again now … and getting answers. Finally.

This is the first product to emerge from Google’s controversial acquisition of travel software company ITA, which closed in April and included concessions and guarantees to existing ITA customers such as Kayak, Microsoft, Orbitz, Hotwire and TripAdvisor. The past five months have been spent on integration of the ITA team and technology in Boston.

This Flight Search beta product breaks no new ground for online travel but points the way toward something more ambitious for Google. The company hinted at that more ambitious product vision in the blog post that announced the acquisition in July 2010:

[W]e think there is room for more competition and greater innovation. Google has already come up with new ways to organize hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, scholarly papers, books and geographic data. Once we’ve completed our acquisition of ITA, we’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket.

Presented in a way that is similar to Google’s current recipe-search tools and UI, a query such as “flights from sf to nyc” will trigger the appearance of a “flights” filter in the left column. That in turn leads to a more “vertical” experience that enables users to search for flights in a variety of different ways.

Below is a screen showing the new flight results page. Fliters on the left allow for refinement of the search by airline, loyalty program, number of stops and so on (not unlike what already exists at many competing travel sites). Users can manipulate dates, flight duration and pricing. They can aslso search for available flights based on destination and budget, a la Travel Muse.

Once an outbound and return flight are selected — there are no one-way or multi-city capabilities right now — users are taken to an airline website to book. The content presented in Flight Search results is all organic. However, as the image below indicates, the booking link is or could be an ad. According to Google this is the only advertising in Flight Search.

Google said it’s still experimenting with the model. It’s not entirely clear what would happen if the selected airline were not an advertiser. Are only advertiser flights being included in the data presented? I assume not. However when most travel sites such as Kayak or Orbitz deliver a user to an airline or hotel site there’s lead-gen fee or bounty paid. And Google may have struck agreements with all the major carriers accordingly.

As the screens above indicate a map figures prominently in the UI. However Google isn’t using Street View or integrating hotel search or its local business database (including reviews) into the product. That’s the opportunity in one sense: to fully leverage Google’s database and existing products to create totally new travel planning tools and user experiences. This is the “promise” of the ITA acquisition.

However Google famously refuses to discuss future plans. Indeed, Google won’t say anything beyond the fact that Google Flight Search is a first step and that it will improve over time. ITA’s “matrix search” may hold some clues to the future of Google Flight and Travel search products:

• Geo Search – search by airport code, city, or nearby airport selector
• Event Finder – plan your trip with a listing of events and things to do
• Interactive Calendar – explore date ranges and find the lowest fares
• Real-time Filters – focus on flights that suit your preferences
• Color-coded Time Bars – compare flights at a glance

Along those lines, one can easily imagine many creative and well integrated user experiences that take advantage of Google’s existing assets. Bing Visual Search for Travel is an example of a creative use of search, content and images for travel planning.

Right now Google Flight Search is a useful, if limited, tool. But absent some of the novel and creative innovations I allude to above, it doesn’t really put pressure on any of the established travel search brands or OTAs. Over time, that could change of course.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the challenging travel vertical, Oyster is hoping to add a fresh layer of editorial relevance, even if it means a slow, difficult process to appropriately tag (manually) and reference all images within its target markets.

Eytan Seidman, co-founder of Oyster, and former Bing / Microsoft Live search engineer, summarized the effort as “a real opportunity to help surface higher quality results“.

Users can use hotel image search to comparison shop by giving a realistic representation of private hotel beaches, hotel pools, and searching by hotel type (luxury vs family friendly) or other specific amenities.

For example, using Oyster Shots to search for a Maui hotel with the best pool, I can narrow down my choices to 4 or 5 “pearl” hotels (aka star ratings):

Search for hotels by image

Upon browsing the images, users can compare hotel features and quality side by side, save favorites or like/dislike a photo, search images by hotel availability, and price data is shown to help make their decision in selecting a hotel for business or leisure travel.

Oyster, which sends their own independent reviewers to each hotel for unbiased reviews and editorial photography, now covers 20 cities, with nearly half a million unique photos covering over 1100 hotels.

The company is expecting to increase that database to over 100 locations in the next 12 months, increasing the image index to over 2 million images and 3500+ hotels, following a partnership with the Travel Channel.

In the next few weeks (no specific timeline has been shared yet), Kayak will begin serving flight search results to Bing to give customers additional results for flights in the “U.S. from multiple cities, airports and airlines, giving customers access to a larger set of flight itineraries.”

The Kayak flight search data will supplement existing Bing Travel tools including Price Predictor, Flights Answers and more.

Bing Travel also made a point to include in the blog post the following statement:

[Bing Travel Supports Competition and Innovation – www.Fairsearch.org]

Kayak is officially listed as a member of the FairSearch Organization, but Google claims English is stating the opposite of what the group has been using as a foundational argument to the DOJ in its opposition to the acquisition. Though English mentioned that they are glad DOJ is looking closely at the terms of the acquisition.

Kayak.com CTO Paul English On Bloomberg

In the interview, English cites a couple reasons why they don’t see Google as such a major threat:

• They’ve anticipated Google’s entrance into travel search market for awhile
• Google has failed with other purchases & acquisitions
• Kayak uses data from ITA only for US flight data (not hotel bookings), among other sources
• They have a small, but nimble & aggressive tech team focused on innovation in travel (also located in Cambridge MA, near ITA Software) building out mobile features, simplifying travel search and releasing site updates weekly

Questions about Kayak’s proposed IPO were strictly off limits during the interview due to SEC rules & regulations, but you can watch the brief interview here:

Kayak IPO Timing

Travel industry analyst Dennis Schaal at Tnooz floated two theories on when Kayak’s proposed IPO might happen, saying the DOJ decision on the ITA acquisition either needs to happen first to clear up any uncertainty around Kayak’s value, or that Kayak can execute the IPO in advance of the decision on ITA, because the information is already transparent in financial filings.