Almost a year after disclosing they are creating a travel inspiration-type technology platform, Google and ITA Software have unveiled its first customer: Air France-KLM.
In April 2011, just weeks after the Google's deal to buy ITA Software was passed by US authorities, ITA started talking about a new piece of technology called InstaSearch.
The service, according to an official at the time, allows travellers without plans to "quickly see a variety of options for possible destinations, dates and travel times. It enables this by maintaining a collection of availability-checked fare and market data [i.e. fares, taxes and fees], and returning that information quickly".
The idea was very much a "proof of concept" at the time, although it emerged just a few days later that a mystery customer was already in the frame, disclosed in documents filed with the officials scrutinising Google's acquisition of ITA.
It appears now that the first customer was Air France-KLM and its iteration of InstaSearch is indeed, as suggested at the time in the documents, called Affinity Search - a piece of branding some might consider rather cheeky given that rival European carrier Lufthansa was the first airline to take the Affinity Shopper system developed by Amadeus.
So what is AF-KLM doing with Google-ITA's take on the world of "affinity"?
Soft launched on AirFrance.com this week for travellers based in Austria, Finland, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK, results on the airline site are displayed on (of course) a Google Map after a user runs through a quick drop down process, such as airport, time-frame, budget and countries.
Each filter can be tweaked during the process and individual fares can be found by zooming and out on the map.
Once a user is armed with a few ideas fort fares, the tool allows them to compare them all on a single page, so details such as times etc can be scrutinised more easily.
Once a selection is made, passengers are thrown back into the usual booking path on the site.
Air France is by no means the latest after Lufthansa to try such a new way of airfare search on the front end of a site - British Airways, for example, developed its own platform called TripSeeker after spending the best part of a year working on a similar platform to the German carrier.
The major difference between the Google-ITA version and the others so far is that they have taken the inspiration element of search to another level, rather than just the parameters around dates, price and destination.
The BA iteration allows users to search for fares based on the type of destination as well, such as whether it is good for nightlife, culture, beach, activities, etc.