This is a brilliant idea from Google's perspective. The travel industry is very very profitable, and a lot of the travel shopping process is basically the hunt for information - tell me where I can stay, how much, give me options, etc. This is a problem Google could really optimize.
Well how I see it, the Airlines are losing money. Not the travel search sites. They still take their cut no matter what the margins look like for the underlying airlines. And it is a lot of revenue, even if not a lot of profit(I doubt that, but don't have relavent experience/documentation to back that up). And at the very least the travel search itself brings a LOT of eyeballs, which google has interest in.
On an unrelated note, ATI's co-founder Dave Baggett was on the founding team for the original "Crash Bandicoot"...which is awesome.
Some do, some don't: there wouldn't be any airlines in business if it wasn't extremely profitable. All that post 9/11 "we're going out of business!%!%#@!!" madness was mostly a TARP-style bail out quest.
The reason you see so many commercials on TV for travel-related sites such as Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline, etc., is because the margins and volumes are so large.
