Travel aggregators and Indian online travel agencies (OTAs) that take a cut on the tickets they sell must have received an almighty fright yesterday, when Google announced that its Flight Search business is being launched in India.
Anything that mentions Google and flight bookings may seem to potentially spell doom for online Indian travel entities like Yatra and Cleartrip, which have garnered significant venture capital money, and some like MakeMyTrip, which have gone public and command a pretty respectable market cap at a little over $1 billion.
One big reason to take this threat seriously is the service's ability to seamlessly integrate things that are part of our everyday life, such as Mail and Maps, to buying airline tickets, a simple one-click-away proposition within Google.
This is the way that Google's Flight Search feature works (for those who haven't encountered the service before): A calendar containing the time period in which you're travelling will display the lowest fares for the route that you've picked, with an accompanying graph that shows how prices go up or down based on seasonal highs and lows that are pegged to things like school vacations, religious holidays, and similar events. You will even be given a list of "Best Flights", which will provide the choicest trade-offs in convenience and price. Google has leveraged its Maps to ensure that all of this can be done with a full visualisation functionality that then allows for easy clicks onto alternative destinations.
16/01/15 ZDNet
Anything that mentions Google and flight bookings may seem to potentially spell doom for online Indian travel entities like Yatra and Cleartrip, which have garnered significant venture capital money, and some like MakeMyTrip, which have gone public and command a pretty respectable market cap at a little over $1 billion.
One big reason to take this threat seriously is the service's ability to seamlessly integrate things that are part of our everyday life, such as Mail and Maps, to buying airline tickets, a simple one-click-away proposition within Google.
This is the way that Google's Flight Search feature works (for those who haven't encountered the service before): A calendar containing the time period in which you're travelling will display the lowest fares for the route that you've picked, with an accompanying graph that shows how prices go up or down based on seasonal highs and lows that are pegged to things like school vacations, religious holidays, and similar events. You will even be given a list of "Best Flights", which will provide the choicest trade-offs in convenience and price. Google has leveraged its Maps to ensure that all of this can be done with a full visualisation functionality that then allows for easy clicks onto alternative destinations.
16/01/15 ZDNet
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