Google Flights, the travel metasearch tool, has officially come out of beta. The Flights product now appears as an option within the Google products dropdown menu.
While no longer in beta, Google Flights still isn't covering its costs. Kourosh Gharachorloo, engineering director of Google's travel team, admitted this week to Business Insider that the division still isn't profitable.
And official or not, it still doesn't look as sophisticated and fully-inventoried as its metasearch competitors.
When the product was announced in 2011, Google foretold of a day when it would
"enable users to type 'flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May' into Google and get not just a set of links but also flight times, fares and a link to sites where you can actually buy tickets quickly and easily."
It's not quite there yet. But in the past year, it stepped closer to that ideal.
Since last July 2013, Tnooz reported on Google Flights enabling travelers who haven't decided where they might like to visit can type in the names of countries or whole regions ("flights to Mexico") to see airfares for various destinations plotted on a map.
There's a flurry of news reports today suggesting this is a new feature, though it's been available for a while in various iterations.
In fact, typing "flights to Europe" in the main Google.com search box also produces flight suggestions in a box to the right of results, and that box has doubled transaction volume, the company says.
Same with the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which generates a surprise suggestion of a place to visit. Contrary to what news outlets like Time is reporting, that's been around since last summer.
Google Flights recently added a flexible-date search feature, something that has long available on competitor sites like Kayak, Skyscanner, and Momondo.
It doesn't have reliably thorough inventory, though. Southwest, the US's largest airline by passenger volume, doesn't let its airfares appear on the main Google Flights results page. Last month, the situation improved in Europe, when Ryanair, the continent's largest airline by passenger volume, agreed to let its fare results appear.
Even so, there can be quirks. Google Flights has faster search results than any of its competitors (who each have to resort to an interstitial page to distract users about the slowness of their results). But it often misses the cheapest fares. It's not clear why.
Doing more at the "inspiration" end of the transaction funnels seems to be a goal. Last summer, Google released a marketing survey it commissioned that found that 54% of travelers aren't decided where they want to go when they first sit down to search.
The most provocative change to Google Flights may not until come next year.
After the Justice Department’s consent decree around Google's purchase of airfare technology company ITA Software expires in October 2016, Google will be able to do have flexibility with its licensing. As consumer advocate Ed Hasbrouck put it to the Washington Post last autumn:
“The real danger is of Google dominance of personalized pricing. Imagine Google being able to incorporate everything it knows about you from your use of all Google services into decisions about what price to put on each airline ticket.
Airlines or services with less info on which to base such price personalization would have a hard time competing with Google.”
A dangerous "open season" on other travel companies? Or an opportunity for the long prophesied personalization of travel results? Or something that won't materialize?
Many industry observers will be eager to see what happens after October. Google had formally committed to let ITA Travel’s customers extend their contracts into 2016.
EARLIER: Google Flight Search increases interactivity with visual airfare mapping