Microsoft Unveils Bing Travel in New Search Engine

Microsoft Corp. announced consumer availability of a new search destination for travelers, Bing Travel, which it says will help consumers make travel decisions. Bing Travel is part of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine designed to take on Google.

Bing Travel combines many of the airfare and hotel tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with rich news and editorial content from MSN Travel. According to a recent survey by Bing Travel, 52 percent of potential travelers search three or more sites before booking their airfare.

Forty-two percent of travelers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options and 17 percent spend more than one month.

Bing Travel aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time consumers spend searching for travel information by presenting comprehensive results in one place, and to help consumers make more informed decisions with tools such as Price Predictor and Rate Indicator.

It uses Farecast technology to analyze more than 175 billion airfare observations and predict whether the price of a flight is going up or down. It also offers people a recommendation of “Buy Now” or “Wait,” including a confidence level and expected price increase or decrease over the next seven days.

Bing’s Rate Indicator analyzes historical rate data from thousands of hotels to determine whether the current price is a good deal, or not a deal at all. People can view a city map with details for each hotel, color coded by Rate Indicator data. It features up-to-the-minute flight and hotel deals for nearly 40 cities around the world.

When people choose their origin city, Bing Travel will show the best airfare and hotel deals it has and will even show them why particular flights are considered deals. For example, people will see that flights to certain destinations may be a record low or more than $150 less than the average for a particular route. Microsoft said people can be sure that all travel deals are based strictly on science, not marketing.

Bing offers comparison Flight & Hotel Search. It also has fare alerts; most airfare price drops last less than 48 hours, so people need to be ready to jump when a fare falls. Fare Alerts will notify people if the fares for their trips drop, allowing them to catch lower fares.

The new Bing Travel combines editorial content from MSN Travel and Farecast to create an in-house team of experts who write daily articles, features, slide shows and blog posts to inspire and educate travelers on destinations, travel news, tips and tricks.

It also features exclusive editorial content from some of the world’s biggest names in travel, including Peter Greenberg and Pauline Frommer. Bing Travel also licenses content from leading publications such as Travel + Leisure, Budget Travel Inc. and The Wall Street Journal.