Google's ITA Software is readying an implementation of its new InstaSearch product for a mystery client with promised response times of three seconds or less.
While the broad outlines of InstaSearch emerged when the U.S. Department of Justice conditionally approved the now-completed Google-ITA Software merger last week, ITA provided details about a customer implementation of InstaSearch in an exhibit [pdf] filed with the settlement documents.
The redacted exhibit is a solution and interface definition document for "one of the global leaders in air travel," perhaps a European entitity because the document says "fare/quote information (including taxes and surcharges) must be accurate up to an equivalent of 5 euro difference."
The customer calls the pending implementation of InstaSearch, believed to be ITA's first for the product, Affinity Search.
Despite any parallels in name and functionality to Amadeus' Affinity Shopper, Amadeus is not believed to be ITA's unnamed client.
In the exhibit, ITA says the client wants ITA to develop a hosted airfare search tool which would be deployed on several websites. ITA writes:
Dubbed Affinity Search, the ITA-hosted service will cater to travelers with less specific travel plans, allowing searches by wide ranges of travel dates, destinations and lengths of stay. Using the latest in ITA's low fare search technology, Affinity Search will be deployed as two separate instances of a single implementation, with each instance tailored to the specific business and technical requirements of [REDACTED].
ITA writes that the client's objective "is to attract new types of customers, and provide an improvement" to conversion ratios.
The dominant feature of the application, ITA writes, uses Google Maps. ITA writes:
The traveler, having entered the website via the country site pick list, is presented with an origin list to pick from. One or more origins is selected, a query is sent to ITA to present an array of destinations available for the origin, represented by markers on the geographical locations of those [REDACTED] destinations in the Google Maps interface.
The consumer can then refine results, altering departure date, the length of stay and the maximum desired price.
Using QPX Cache, ITA is geared to return the lowest price per destination based on departure dates "with no greater than 800 destinations (and prices) per returned query," ITA writes.
A level 2 query takes the destination chosen in the original query and provides the lowest-priced fare for each day, using a one month range of departure days for the city pairs provided, ITA writes.
This latter query goes directly to QPX and "returns fully priced, availability-checked pricing solutions," ITA writes.
ITA writes that the customer, which will be responsible for implementation of the front-end application, plans to deploy the solution at a single point of sale and then roll it out more widely as part of a six-month trial.