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.”
