Disappointment for those eager to see the Farecast system on Bing Travel hit Europe and elsewhere with confirmation Microsoft will not be able to roll it out to territories outside of North America in 2009.
Microsoft is believed to have originally wanted to launch the Farecast technology behind its Bing Travel portal in at least the UK by the end of this year.
Officials in the UK office said this week that the metasearch engine and price prediction technology associated with the Bing Travel brand in the US would remain under wraps elsewhere for the time being.
Cedric Chambaz, marketing manager for search and SMB, says:
The value of this feature lays in the price predictor which itself relies on an historical data base that enables the engine to do statistical projections.
The Farecast data base is US focused, so an international roll out of the exact same product feature would require the existence/identification/acquisition/renting/etc. of an equivalent data base for the rest of the world.
"The value of this feature lays in the price predictor which itself relies on an historical database that enables the engine to do statistical projections.
"The Farecast database is US focused, so an international roll out of the exact same product feature would require the existence/identification/acquisition/renting/etc. of an equivalent data base for the rest of the world."
Farecast was bought by Microsoft in April 2008 and originally integrated the product into its Live Search platform in the US.
The platform relaunched as Bing Travel in June 2009 as Microsoft through the doors open on its latest attempt to gain market share in search with the new Bing engine.
Expansion of a platform which has historic data from the US at its heart - and therefore not so useful for European internal travellers - meant inevitably that the roll-out strategy would take a lot of work behind the scenes.
Officials in the US are understood to be deciding whether to launch simultaneously across a number of markets (such as Germany, France and the UK), which may take longer to organise from a data capture perspective, or by individual countries.
The addition of the full Bing Travel service outside of the US would certainly add a different element to the already crowded but, some argue, formulaic metasearch marketplace.
Last week Cheapflights disclosed it is working on a meatsearch product and this year alone has seen the launch of TripAdvisor Flight Search and Fly.com outside of the US.