Google's hotel strategy could get a good boost from its pending ITA Software acquisition.
ITA Software, which is known for its flight search business, has been "looking at" hotel search for "a couple of years," according to someone familiar with the matter.
And, ITA Software has staff dedicated to hotel search with assigned goals for 2010, the source says.
Google undoubtedly is in the loop about ITA's hotel-search efforts.
Google has been running a beta for hotel search and pricing in Google Maps, and could conceivably tap into ITA's nascent hotel-search efforts.
In the online travel business, hotels are the sweet spot for online travel agencies and metasearch companies. Google's potential to improve its flight search business through the ITA Software deal has caused a stir, but Google's potential hotel efforts -- with ITA or without -- could further ratchet up tensions.
ITA has specialized in throwing coding and computer power into sorting billions of fare combinations, but hotel search is different.
Hotels don't change their rates eight times per day, as airlines sometimes do for fares, but on the other hand the hotel arena is much more fragmented than the airline industry, and, for ITA, accessing hotel data would be a particular challenge.