Google: We Won't Be a Copycat in Travel

After writing Kayak's Hafner Awaits Google Hotels and the Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0 , I spoke with Google's managing director of travel and learned a lot more about what Google won't do in travel.

Here are some headlines from my conversation with Rob Torres, who emphasized that all options -- including the build versus buy equation -- are on the table. Torres said:

• Google monitors all competitors, regardless of their market share, but "we are not going to copycat. We will only do something if we can do it 10 times better than what's happening today."

• "Microsoft made a great acquisition in Farecast," but Google likely would take another route. "We don't have anything like that," Torres said, referring to Bing Travel, "and we don't intend to do something like that."

• Asked whether Google would acquire a company like Kayak or FareCompare, Torres said: "Would we acquire a Kayak just to be a Kayak? Probably not."

• "If anyone can come up with a game-changing opportunity" in travel, it would be Google, he said.

• Torres doesn't see Google introducing metasearch as an aforementioned game-changing opportunity. "The reality is that Kayak and others already are doing that very well."

• Kayak CEO Steve Hafner was being "highly speculative" and started from erroneous assumptions when he said Google doesn't care about flights and would bolster its stance in the travel business in the hotel sector. "We don't look at it as one versus another [air versus hotel]," but view the travel vertical "wholistically," Torres said. "I think our flight partners are very important. That's where they [most trip-planning queries] start."

• Asked why then Google did not further develop it's one-box flight search , launched in late 2005, Torres said "it has taken time to figure out the next step."

• Torres said Google's recent introductions of City Tours and Favorite Places, two travel applications leveraging Google Maps, were "nothing really big" in terms of the big picture and "not necessarily driving a travel product."

• A widely held view, Torres stated that the possibility of Google introducing a "transactional model" like an online travel agency are remote.

• Rather than attacking things piecemeal, Torres said Google looks to improve search across specific verticals and industries, including travel. He said Google has tremendous relatively untapped assets, including Google Maps, Google Base and YouTube.

So, now we know some of the things that Google likely will not do in travel.

Torres said that "time will tell" what steps Google would take.

Of the travel business, Torres said: "Certainly our interest hasn't waned over time."

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How FareCompare Uses 170 Twitter Accounts, ITA Software for 'Dramatic' Uptick

FareCompare, the metasearch site, has more than 170 departure-city based Twitter accounts and it is using them to leverage a calendar-based search, powered by ITA Software, for what CEO Rick Seaney claims is a "dramatic" increase in ticket-sale percentages.

FareCompare, of course, doesn't handle any bookings, but passes off consumers to sites like Orbitz and CheapTickets for reservations.

In the last two months or so, FareCompare began tweeting fare drops using 170 Twitter accounts, such as flyfromEWR, based on the 170 cities in North America with the highest outbound passenger traffic. You can read more here about what FareCompare is doing on Twitter.

The vast majority of the tweets are automated, but FareCompare occasionally has some real-life humans toss in breaking news or other morsels.

So, when flyfromEWR tweeted yesterday "$511r/t Newark to Moscow, fall or winter down 20% [http://bit.ly/40SxBr] #EWR, the #fare," the link starts a flexible, calendar-based search after you enter the month, desired length of stay and number of passengers.

A calendar-based search, powered by ITA Software in the background, checks for seat availabilities using 180 queries (30 days and six lengths of stay), saving the consumer all that "hunting and pecking" that they would have to do to find a seat with a particular fare otherwise, Seaney says.

"We do all of that typing in one shot," Seaney adds.

Using a proprietary algorithm to cull ATPCO pricing-departure data to find fare-drops in tandem with the calendar-based search from ITA, Seaney terms the process "a culmination of four years of work."

"We think this is the right way to shop to save time and money if you have the flexibility," Seaney says.

FareCompare has embedded links to the calendar-based search in its e-mail alerts for around three months, but he views Twitter as more effective than e-mail marketing because the fare drops are tweeted in real-time.

The calendar-based search currently is in a soft-launch phase on FareCompare, and will be getting some home page presence within a week or so.

"Using Twitter as a real-time communication backbone that can touch people in a social network with relevant, actionable information instantly -- is absolutely the next generation in air travel bargain-finding," Seaney said.

Of course, all of that searching using ITA Software is expensive. In addition to referral fees to suppliers, FareCompare makes money, like everyone else, through the advertising around the rails.

Seaney wouldn't provide any precise figures on how significantly ticket sales for FareCompare's suppliers actually have risen, and the company only has been using the 170 Twitter accounts for about two months.

flyfromEWR only had 170 followers today; flyfromLAX had 338 as of this writing.

Still, from the tweet sound of it, it appears that FareCompare is onto something.