Google launched a flight search tool on Tuesday in a potential challenge to online travel services. Flight Search is the first travel product from Google since its $700 million acquisition of ITA Software earlier this year.
“Since then, our engineering teams have been working closely together to build new travel tools that provide faster, more flexible, and more useful results to online travel searches,” Google said in a blog post.
A “Flights” link will appear on the left-hand side of the page when a Google search user types in a query for flight information. Flight Search can also be directly accessed through google.com/flights.
For the moment, Flight Search only offers flights for a limited number of US cities and shows results for round-trip economy-class flights only. Google said it will add more cities and options later.
Flight Search shows flight options for a selected destination organized by departure time and date, airport, price or airline.
“Airlines control how their flights are marketed, so as with other flight search providers, our booking links point to airline websites only,” Google said.