Last April, Google’s $700 million ITA acquisition was finally approved with conditions (restrictions?) regarding other travel search competitors, as Google cannot block results coming from them.  And today, Google finally launched the ITA-powered flight search service.

Google’s Flight Search is a user-friendly tool that allows users to input origin, destination, price, duration and departure as well as adjust some filters such as the number of stops, airline of preference, flight connections, outbound time and return time.  You can also do an open-ended search by just setting a specific price or date.

The tool has some drawbacks as international flight search is currently unavailable, as well as one-way or multi-stop flights.  Aside from that, only a limited number of destinations are currently available and they only display economy-class prices.  Google said they plan on adding more destinations and features in the future.

“Flights are chosen primarily based on cost and total travel time, while covering a variety of departure times and airlines,” Kourosh Gharachorloo, Engineering Director, writes on Google’s Inside Search Blog. “We automatically set the filters to focus on options which are reasonable in both price and duration, and you can always adjust the filters to show even more flights.”

Google’s Flight Search already hit a snag, as they showed The World Trade Center when you type in New York as your destination.  The embarrassing gaffe has already been fixed as the WTC option is no longer found in the search.

As for travel search competitors, Kayak doesn’t seem to be threatened by the Google service as ITA licensed airfare search only accounts for 42% of their overall airfare query results, and that airline travel queries account for 85% of total searches performed on Kayak’s websites and mobile applications.  They don’t see any negative results even if users choose to use Google’s Flight Search tool.  And they just released the “Hacker Fares” feature where  travellers can partner up two one-way tickets to save up money.  Take that Google!

Kayak released a statement regarding Google’s new service, “We’re confident in our ability to compete, and we believe our flight search technology is superior. We recognize Google is a formidable competitor but they haven’t been successful in every vertical they’ve entered. We use multiple data sources and proprietary technology, all of which helps us in our efforts to provide people with comprehensive, fast and accurate answers to their flight search needs”.

As for Bing Travel, they shouldn’t be too worried either, as they still have better features compared to Google, especially with their price predictor that tells you if you should buy flight tickets now or later and a strong hotel search.

Honestly, I think Momondo, a global travel site that offers free service assistance for all your travel needs, has better features than Google Flight Search.  Heck, Momondo has one-way and multi-stop options as well hotel and transport assistance and international flights.