$1 Billion: Google to acquire ITA Software?

Menlo Park (global-adventures.us): Is Google on its way to become an online travel business? After showing hotel listings with room rates on its map application to some users since March, Google has made a $1 billion bid to acquire ITA Software, several news outlets report.

ITA is a travel industry software company that offers an airfare search and pricing system called QPX. The software is used by several U.S. airlines and online travel agencies Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, and Bing Travel, among many others. The Cambridge based company also developed the Internet booking engine IBE and a passenger reservation management system, called RES.

While diversifying its business seems to be Google's main interest, keeping customers more engaged in its applications ranks certainly high on its to-do list. Customers can already use Google to plan travel, but they will eventually get links to other travel sites like Expedia, Hotwire, or Orbitz.

If the reports are true and Google follows through with the ITA Software acquisition, would this be a game changer? Most analysts speculate that Google will never sell tickets, only information. Due to Google’s usual scale of doing business, that could mean trouble for other sites based on the same model, some news outlets report. Google could use its mapping program to display rates and eventually integrate the service into its Android operating system to allow smartphone users to review hotel rates and airfares on the go.

However, Google could also be interested in Needle, a platform developed by ITA Software to acquire, integrate, clean, analyze and publish data on the web. Basically, the software can search websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets for data and merge variant forms of the same record. Needle then allows users to extract and view the information in whatever way they want. This sounds almost like an advanced search algorithm that can be used to gather and analyze information for anything from hotel rates to airfares to migrating patterns of right whales – the sky seems to be the limit.