Google has taken an extra step towards its unofficial war against affiliates. To aid the consumer Google will soon be able to help people to find flights and holiday by using its search engines and then link direct to the checkout pages of airlines and holiday companies.
For many years affiliates have run successful businesses in the travel niche by providing reviews of destinations and airlines to attract customers who then follow the affiliate links which gains the affiliate a commission on the purchase.
Google’s latest aquisition gives them the technology and patents to cut out the middle men and be the link between arilines and customers.
Google’s announcement this morning:
How cool would it be if you could type “flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May” into Google and get not just a set of links but also flight times, fares and a link to sites where you can actually buy tickets quickly and easily? Well that’s exactly why we announced our intention to buy ITA Software, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that specializes in organizing airline data last July—and we’re excited that the U.S. Department of Justice today approved our acquisition.
It’s important to us that ITA continue with business as usual, providing great service to its business partners. We indicated last July that we would honor ITA’s existing contracts. Today we’ve formally committed to let ITA’s customers extend their contracts into 2016. We’ve also agreed to let both current and new customers license ITA’s QPX software on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” into 2016—along with related commitments aimed at making ITA’s technology available to other travel sites.
We’re moving to close this acquisition as soon as possible, and then we’ll start the important work of bringing our teams and products together. We’re confident that by combining ITA’s expertise with Google’s technology we’ll be able to develop exciting new flight search tools for all our users. Up, up and away!
Posted by Jeff Huber, Senior Vice President, Commerce and Local.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the travel niche online. Hopefully many of the quality review sites will still get the lion’s share of the traffic but some thinner pages will no doubt be bypassed.
If you run a flight affiliate site now is the time to make it something special and cross those fingers!
