Google has acquired ITA Software which provides flight pricing and information to travel agencies and travel websites. You have probably heard of Sabre which does the same thing and there are many such companies that provide information to agencies, flight terminals and websites.

Meta search engines like Bing, Kayak, Hotwire, Priceline aggregate this information from the Sabre, ITA, online travel agencies like Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and travel websites Delta.com and others, and present it on their website.

I am not sure what Google hopes to do differently than what Bing, Kayak and others are already doing. If they do it will only be incremental or make little difference if any at all. This reminds me of the acquisition of dMarc, a radio broadcasting and advertising company, which Google paid close to $1 billion in earn-outs and it bombed badly. Google ended up selling the company back to the founders a year later for pennies.