Tue, 07/27/2010 – 11:45 by The relatively new ITA
OnTheFly iPhone app — BlackBerry and Android are coming — provides one of the better mobile travel experiences. The catch is you can’t book anything directly with the app. You must go to a preferred airline’s app/site or call. The company, which Google is
in the process of acquiring, says that its mobile app
offers a “demonstration of ITA’s QPX airfare shopping engine on a mobile app.” OnTheFly allows side-by-side airline price comparisons, easy airport and date selection and interactive mapping. Should the ITA deal pass regulatory muster the travel comparison app could quickly become part of a more comprehensive Google travel app/tool.
One of ITA’s “properties” is
Needlebase, which scrapes, organizes and de-dupes unstructured data from the Web. Here’s a rudimentary example of its capabilities:
As you can see all sorts of related content and information have been collected regarding the destination city: events, dining, attractions.
While other OTAs and aggregators provide additional information about destinations and vacations, Google’s in a strong position to quickly dominate consumer traffic in the consumer travel segment if 1) ITA’s purchase is allowed and 2) it packages the presentation of content in an elegant way — especially with this broader data.
Ironically, while the former may be a near
fait accompli the latter is not. Google’s local and mobile properties are proliferating and it will be somewhat challenging to bring all the data, capabilities and interfaces together in coherent ways.
Thanks to Gary Price for the tip.
