Search engine giant Google has entered the travel market after acquiring flight information firm ITA Software.
ITA provides software that organises fares, flight and journey times that are used by airlines, travel agents and flight comparison sites such as Orbitz.
Google paid $700m in cash for the US-based company, founded in 1996 by a team of MIT computer scientists.
"What we're going to do is build new flight search tools that focus on end users," said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
However, he said that the firm would not be selling airline tickets to consumers and that it would honour "all existing agreements that ITA has with its partners".
Those partners include some of Google's direct competitors - such as Microsoft's own flight comparison website, Bing Travel.
Other firms which had been bidding for ITA included Travelport, Expedia and Kayak, many of which are also dependent on ITA for their flight data.
A spokesman for Kayak told BBC News that, for now, they were not concerned.
"In the short term, it's not an issue, because Google said it's honouring existing agreements," he said.
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