OAG NEPAL

Google Corporation on Thursday announced that is has decided to buy airline travel software company coITA for about $700 million in a bid to improve its services that help clients to look for flight and fare details.

According to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, “What we’re going to do is build new flight search tools that focus on end-users.” He also said that right now the company has no plans to sell air tickets to customers and the company would honour all existing agreements that ITA has with its partners.

Industry experts are worried that if Google takes over coITA, then it could end up manipulating the travel sector by having a monopoly.

ITA is known for providing software that is used for organizing flight related information like timings and fare. The company, which has about 500 employees, is the major source of information about the aviation industry and is used by airlines, travel agents and large companies providing travel related information.

According to some anti-trust lawyers, the Google-ITA deal is likely to be investigated by the regulators but would ultimately be approved. The concern is not that the deal would make Google powerful in this segment, but is that it could use its influence to damage other travel companies.