Google Flight Search

Google Flight Search Suffers Some Turbulence

It may work with jetlike speed, but other services still offer greater choice.

n April this year, Google bought ITA Software, a company that provides airfare data to travel sites including Kayak, Hipmunk, and Orbitz. This month, after the U.S. Department of Justice gave permission for the acquisition of ITA under conditions designed to maintain healthy competition in the sector, Google launched its own travel service, called Flight Search.

In flight: Google Flight Search lets users select flights by clicking on different cities on a map of the United States.
Credit: Google

Google users can now search for, say, "flight from Boston to San Francisco," click on the "Flights" button that appears at the left of the Flight Search screen, and see options and prices in a fraction of a second—considerably faster than many other airfare services. A user can adjust parameters like date, time, and number of stops, and then select and purchase a ticket.
Flight Search also offers some nifty innovative features, such as a map that lets users click on cities to choose a route and a chart that shows how price fluctuates over time. The latter is especially helpful.
As Google often does, it emphasized how fast Flight Search is in a video introducing the new service, promising "results that update instantly"—that is, when a user changes a para