 | |
Type of site | Travel services |
|---|---|
| Owner | Microsoft |
| URL | www |
| Launched | September 15, 2010 |
MSN Travel (previously Bing Travel, Live Search Farecast, and Farecast.com) is an airfare prediction website in the computer reservations system industry. It premiered to the public as Farecast on May 15, 2007. Until 2014, it offered predictions regarding the best time to purchase airline tickets. [1] [2]
Farecast was founded in 2003; Farecast's team of data miners used airfare observations to build algorithms to predict future airfare price movements. [3] In April 2008, Farecast was acquired by Microsoft for $115 million. [4] Microsoft officially integrated it as part of its Live Search group of tools in May 2008. On June 3, 2009, Microsoft officially rebranded Live Search Farecast as Bing Travel as part of its efforts to create a new search identity. [5]
In January 2014, the airfare prediction feature was removed. [6] [7]
In May 2015, Microsoft rebranded Bing Travel to MSN Travel and redirected the Bing URL to MSN Travel. [8]
In August 2015, MSN Travel flight search pages changed from being powered by KAYAK to competitor Skyscanner. [9] [10]
In 2009, there were allegations that Bing Travel had copied its layouts from Kayak.com. Microsoft denied the allegations. [11]
MSN is an American web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95.
ITA Software is a travel industry software division of Google, formerly an independent company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded by Jeremy Wertheimer, a computer scientist from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Cooper Union, with his partner Richard Aiken in 1996. On July 1, 2010, ITA agreed to be acquired by Google. On April 8, 2011, the US Department of Justice approved the buyout. As part of the agreement, Google was required to license ITA software to other websites for five years.
Windows Live is a discontinued brand name for a set of web services and software products developed by Microsoft as part of its software-as-a-service platform. Chief components under the brand name included web services, several computer programs that interact with the services, and specialized web services for mobile devices.
Bing Maps is a web mapping service provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines and powered by the Bing Maps Platform framework which also support Bing Maps for Enterprise APIs and Azure Maps APIs. Since 2020, the map data is provided by TomTom, OpenStreetMap and others.
Microsoft Bing, commonly referred to as Bing, is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.
Cheapflights is a travel fare metasearch engine. The website is part of the Kayak.com subsidiary of Booking Holdings.
Bing Videos is a video search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. The service enables users to search and view videos across various websites. Bing Videos was officially released on September 26, 2007 as Live Search Video, and rebranded as Bing Videos on June 1, 2009.
Kayak is a metasearch engine for travel services, including airline flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages. It is owned and operated by Booking Holdings.
Bing for mobile is a search tool for handheld mobile devices from Microsoft as part of their Bing search engine. It is designed for mobile device displays. Bing Mobile is built into Windows Mobile and Windows Phone as proprietary software, accessed via the Search key on Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 devices. It is also available on Windows Phone 8.1, and can be downloaded for other platforms, including and Android.
Microsoft engineering groups are the operating divisions of Microsoft. Starting in April 2002, Microsoft organised itself into seven groups, each an independent financial entity. In September 2005, Microsoft announced a reorganization of its then seven groups into three. In July 2013, Microsoft announced another reorganization into five engineering groups and six corporate affairs groups. A year later, in June 2015, Microsoft reformed into three engineering groups. In September 2016, a new group was created to focus on artificial intelligence and research. On March 29, 2018, a new structure merged all of these into three.
Bing Shopping is a products search and discovery service that helps save time by bringing products from multiple sellers together on a single website. It uses Bing to show product results–including photos and product details. Products can be filtered and prices compared. Purchases are completed on the seller's website.
Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail, is a free personal email service offered by Microsoft. This includes a webmail interface featuring mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. Outlook can also be accessed via email clients using the IMAP or POP protocols.
Skyscanner is a search aggregator and travel agency based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The site is available in over 30 languages and is used by 100 million people per month. The company lets people research and book travel options for their trips, including flights, hotels and car hire.
Momondo is a travel fare aggregator and travel fare metasearch engine. momondo was founded in Denmark and is today managed by KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings.
Zoombu was a travel metasearch engine for Europe. The company was acquired by Skyscanner and shutdown.
HomeAway was a vacation rental marketplace. It operated through 50 websites in 23 languages through which it offered rentals of cabins, condos, castles, villas, barns, and farmhouses.
Microsoft mobile services are a set of proprietary mobile services created specifically for mobile devices; they are typically offered through mobile applications and mobile browser for Windows Phone platforms, BREW, and Java. Microsoft's mobile services are typically connected with a Microsoft account and often come preinstalled on Microsoft's own mobile operating systems while they are offered via various means for other platforms. Microsoft started to develop for mobile computing platforms with the launch of Windows CE in 1996 and later added Microsoft's Pocket Office suite to their Handheld PC line of PDAs in April 2000. From December 2014 to June 2015, Microsoft made a number of corporate acquisitions, buying several of the top applications listed in Google Play and the App Store including Acompli, Sunrise Calendar, Datazen, Wunderlist, Echo Notification Lockscreen, and MileIQ.
Booking Holdings Inc. is an American travel technology company incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law and based in Norwalk, Connecticut, that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines including namesake and flagship Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable. It operates websites in about 40 languages and 200 countries.
Tripcombi, founded in 2012 as Tripdelta, was a travel metasearch engine that enabled travelers to find airfares globally from different online travel agencies and airlines. It did this by using hidden flight routing and hidden city ticketing techniques. Tripdelta's tactics included combining two separate ticket bookings, searching airfares on low-cost carriers, and booking passengers in the airports close to their place of departure and their intended destination. In March 2015, Tripdelta took part in the third batch of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Berlin. The company was based in Cologne, Germany and, in 2015, was voted as one of "Germany's Top 25 Hottest Young Companies" by Horizont.
Hopper, Inc. is a travel booking app and online travel marketplace that sells flights, hotels, rental cars, and short-term rentals. The company is headquartered in Montreal, Canada and Boston, Massachusetts.
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| Rebranded | |
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| Discontinued | |
