We
have all looked online to compare flight prices using websites such as:
Expedia.com, skyscanner.co.uk, and swoodoo.com.
Since last year, the European population has been given access to Google’s
new pet project, Google Flight Search.
Initially available in the USA since 2011, it was only in March of 2013
that Google brought this flight comparing software to Europe. Basically, it works very similarly to the
existing websites in that a user can input their city of departure and their
destination, and the software will come back with the ‘best’ flights available
for the selected dates. As it is quite a
recent project, a lot of the functionalities are very limited relative to the
other websites available, but these limitations can also be seen as a
simplification of the process to make it more user friendly for all customers.
Yesterday
the low-cost carrier Ryanair have confirmed a partnership with Google to allow
the latter to post results relating to Ryanair’s flights on Google Flight
Search, as revealed by Travolution.com.
As of today, some low-cost carriers are still not part of the Google Flight
Search’s results, such as Easyjet. This
partnership between Ryanair and Google will enable the former to help increase
their visibility on the web, as well as giving Google more credibility as a
flight search engine provider. As Google
Flight Search is still on its training wheels, we believe it should improve its
networks within the airline community, in addition to expanding its services
worldwide.
Nowadays,
Google has become one of the main search engines used, to such an extent that
it has become a verb to replace the word search (when talking about an internet
search): ‘Google it’. As mentioned on
Statisticbrain.com, in 2013 the average daily number of Google searches
amounted to 5,922,000,000. These numbers
also seem to be steadily rising each year.
Additionally, Google has managed to diversify into many different fields
such as Android smartphones, Gmail, Google+, YouTube, and Google Glass. Therefore it appears logical to us that
Google would aim to reach the flight searching market. Should they follow in their previous
footsteps for their other endeavours, soon it will be normal for people to say ‘Google
Flight it!’
Recently,
it has been revealed by Businessweek.com that Expedia has suffered a drop in their
visibility on Google. It is speculated
that Google are penalising Expedia for adding tags and links to various blogs
and websites to increase their search engine ranking. Indeed, when tags such as ‘low cost flights’
or ‘budget airlines’ are added to more and more web pages, these will make
websites such as Expedia which are linked to such tags more popular. It is also possible however, that Google is
grasping at straws to put their competition at a disadvantage so that they can
increase the visibility of their own Google Flight Search.
Although
it appears that for the time being Google Flight Search is still far from being
the foremost flight comparing software available, especially given the limited
number of airlines that it includes in its results, it is well on its way to
establishing a foothold in this industry by partnering with Ryanair. In the past, Google have shown to be quite
aggressive in their development strategies (think Android vs. iOS), and so we
believe that with some improvements with the current version of Google Flight
Search, they will be able to obtain a comfortable market share.
Sources:
http://www.travolution.com/articles/2014/01/22/7479/ryanair-partners-with-google-flight-search.html
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