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Does anyone know enough about airline pricing to deconstruct the risk here? Are providers like Google required to disclose the underlying airline price, so Goog

Does anyone know enough about airline pricing to deconstruct the risk here? Are providers like Google required to disclose the underlying airline price, so Google is absorbing your risk of regret on that? If not, and Google has discretion in what to quote, isn't this guarantee really just a promise not to offer you a better price later?

squeaky-clean 7y ago
I work with airline pricing but I'm no expert on that (this vertical is ridiculously complex. Half for necessary reasons and half because of 70 years of technical baggage), and I'm also no legal expert. So take everything here with a million grains of salt. But I do not believe so. From my experience airlines are extremely strict about their partners displaying correct pricing. I've been told displaying a price lower than what is available is illegal / a liability and work under that assumption but I'm not the person who knows the specifics. However displaying a price higher than the lowest available will also get us in big trouble with the airlines. Maybe my work is biased since I deal with promotional campaigns and ads, but the general reason for a complaint will be something like (just making up fake examples) the airline having a 24-hour sale, and because we our systems didn't pick up on that for 2 hours so that's 1/12 their marketing budget thrown away. Furthermore, many airlines don't directly manage their own booking and pricing and instead have it managed by a third party. So aside from legality and conditions from the airline, you can also be bound to conditions by your reservation system. There are plenty of them, but if you want one to Google for your curiosity Sabre Corporation is the largest.
leereeves 7y ago
It seems to me that Google probably expects to lose some money, but they've decided it's worth it to buy some market share for their new product.

squeaky-clean 7y ago

I work with airline pricing but I'm no expert on that (this vertical is ridiculously complex. Half for necessary reasons and half because of 70 years of technical baggage), and I'm also no legal expert. So take everything here with a million grains of salt. But I do not believe so. From my experience airlines are extremely strict about their partners displaying correct pricing. I've been told displaying a price lower than what is available is illegal / a liability and work under that assumption but I'm not the person who knows the specifics. However displaying a price higher than the lowest available will also get us in big trouble with the airlines. Maybe my work is biased since I deal with promotional campaigns and ads, but the general reason for a complaint will be something like (just making up fake examples) the airline having a 24-hour sale, and because we our systems didn't pick up on that for 2 hours so that's 1/12 their marketing budget thrown away. Furthermore, many airlines don't directly manage their own booking and pricing and instead have it managed by a third party. So aside from legality and conditions from the airline, you can also be bound to conditions by your reservation system. There are plenty of them, but if you want one to Google for your curiosity Sabre Corporation is the largest.

leereeves 7y ago

It seems to me that Google probably expects to lose some money, but they've decided it's worth it to buy some market share for their new product.