Ryanair CEO Claims Airline Is Working With Google On A Flight Search & Comparison Tool

In an interview published by Irish Independent, Irish airlines Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary claims his airline has entered a partnership with Google, and is providing the search engine with flight pricing to help build a travel search and comparison tool.

“We’ll be sharing the Ryanair pricing through all of the Google outlets, so when you go in, there’ll be route selections, cheapest prices and so on,” said O’Leary, “Google [is] developing a price-comparison thing themselves.”

O’Leary explained Google would not be charging Ryanair for listing its flight information:

Because Google, being Google, wants to show all of the prices from all of their airlines on display. They don’t want to charge us, they make all of their money out of advertising…They don’t want to have a limited or biased search. They want to be able to say they’ve screened all of these airlines on all the routes.

According to the interview, the Ryanair CEO said the project is expected to go live by the end of March.

Last March, Google updated its existing flight search tool for the US to include 500 international airports, as well as making the tool available to users in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

(Tip: Gigaom)