Google's little flight search problem

If you haven't Googled a flight itinerary recently, you should try it.

Google's Flight Search, the fledgling search engine that lets you find a ticket and book it directly through an airline, is getting better. Much better.

In recent weeks, the new service has quietly expanded the number of U.S. cities it covers. (It won't say how many destinations are being served, except that the number has doubled.) Google has also integrated flight searches into its authoritative search results, making them easier to find and use.

When I wrote about Flight Search in the fall, it was widely regarded as a work in progress. But that work is progressing at a speedy clip. You might even say that it's flying. "Our goal here is to develop the best possible user experience," says Sean Carlson, a spokesman for Google.

But for whom is the upgraded Flight Search better? For customers like you and me? In the short term, yes. We get to find cheap flights through its slick and blazing-fast search engine, which is powered by recently acquired ITA Software.

For Google? Of course. A more functional site means more bookings, although the company declines to say how many tickets it has sold through this new flights interface.

For the rest of the travel industry, and particularly online travel agencies such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity? Maybe not.

Those online agencies want to sell their tickets through Flight Search, and although Google says discussions about including the big three agencies are "ongoing," no agreement has been reached. Google describes these discussions as a good-faith dialogue, but some think that the online agencies aren't a part of Google's business plan and will never be included. Buy a ticket through Flight Search, and you're taken straight to an airline website, although Google says that it's displaying search results from online agencies on a "test" basis under some results.

Think this has no bearing on how you travel? If only.

This little squabble is a sign of a much bigger challenge down the road -- one that led Google's farsighted rivals to fight hard, but unsuccessfully, to block Google's ITA purchase.

The problem isn't the Flight Search of today, an emerging competitor to the big three online agencies. It's what Flight Search could be in a year or two.

Look around at other Google products. If you need to find something online, your first choice is Google's dominant search engine. Often, it's your only choice. If you're looking for a sleek, intuitive e-mail service, it's Gmail. A place for online video? Google's YouTube. For easy online ads? AdSense by Google.

We live in a Google world. Google holds more than a 70 percent market share among online search engines. Gmail is one of the most popular e-mail services and certainly the easiest to use. Sites such as YouTube and AdSense don't have any meaningful competition.

To suggest that Google isn't in travel to do anything less than dominate in the same way would be naive.

So what's the problem? Isn't the current system -- with travel agents facilitating the purchase -- inefficient and in need of a smarter approach? Possibly.

But there may be such a thing as too smart.

It isn't difficult to imagine Google controlling most online travel purchases in the not-too-distant future. And until recently, I didn't have an issue with that; after all, if Google can offer cheaper tickets or better flight options by cutting out the middleman, who cares?

And then, one recent Sunday afternoon, I posted a trailer (http://youtu.be/iejNE9gba6w) for my new book, "Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals" on YouTube. Within a few minutes, the video was deleted -- erroneously tagged as spam by Google. (With a title like "Scammed," that's an easy mistake to make.) But then YouTube pulled my entire channel down without notice. And then my Gmail account went dark. Within a few minutes, my entire digital life had been suspended.

I managed to restore my e-mail account the same day, but my YouTube channel remained offline for three days, even though I made repeated attempts to persuade Google to review the arbitrary takedown. Google eventually restored my account, but only after I contacted it in an official capacity. The company apologized for the deletion but would not offer an explanation for its actions on the record, citing its policy of not discussing individual cases.

Of course, I'm not saying that Google would ever, or could ever, do the same to its travel competitors. In fact, Kayak has said that it's "confident in its ability to compete" with Google Flight Search. But my experience taught me an important lesson about how integral Google is to my everyday life. I can't function without it.

I can't imagine this breathtaking dominance escaping the attention of regulators much longer. But if it does -- if Google takes over travel -- there could be serious and long-lasting consequences that could harm consumers and businesses. Imagine what might happen to an airline or hotel company that disagrees with the way Google prices its products when it holds a commanding market share in travel? It could be cut off from millions of customers with a single keystroke.

What if Google drives one or two online travel agencies, or a company such as Kayak, which searches multiple sites for flights, out of business? Where do we go when our only viable option is Google? What would happen to innovation when one company controls so much?

"Consumers would pay higher prices for airfares and other products and services as a result of Google coming to dominate the online travel market," predicts Ben Hammer, a spokesman for FairSearch, a coalition of travel companies that compete with Google.

Do we really want to live in that world?

Christopher Elliott is the author of "Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals" (Wiley). He's also the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and the co-founder of the Consumer Travel Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for travelers. Read more tips on his blog, elliott.org or e-mail him at chris@elliott.org. Christopher Elliott receives a great deal of reader mail, and though he answers them as quickly as possible, your story may not be published for several months because of a backlog of cases.

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Cannolis, raviolis and 'tude: Arthur Ave. in the Bronx wants to be known as real Little Italy

NEW YORK (AP) — Arthur Avenue in the Bronx is the kind of place where you might be bribed with a cannoli.

Many years ago, my father, a teacher, was begged by a student not to tell his parents he'd been caught fighting. "I'll bring you a box of cannolis every Friday," promised the student, who worked at a pastry shop in this old-school Italian-American enclave.

My dad did not accept the cannolis. But as a kid growing up in nearby suburbs, I often had treats from Arthur Avenue that he brought home. Then one day, I saw Arthur Avenue listed on an iPod app for New York City destinations and decided it was time to get to know the old neighborhood myself, before it morphed into some Disneyland of Italian-Americanness.

I'm happy to report that while Little Italy in downtown Manhattan has shrunk to barely two and a half blocks, what some call the "Real Little Italy" in the Belmont section of the Bronx is thriving, and it's as authentic as ever.

Visitors will readily find dozens of Italian restaurants, bakeries, butchers and produce stands that still sell all the goodies my grandfather remembers from growing up in the Bronx. But it's the mix of the surly and solicitous on this several-block stretch of Arthur Avenue and the intersecting 187th Street that lets you know this is a real community, in which a slight wariness of outsiders can only slowly be scratched away to expose a deeper warmth. Leave to others the affected display of intimacy or token use of ciao: On Arthur Avenue, if someone speaks to you in Italian, it's because he thinks you do. If someone greets you, it's because he knows you.

On a recent visit, as I tagged along with my father and grandparents to see the neighborhood through their eyes, my grandpa grabbed a hunk of meat at Biancardi's and exclaimed, "Pork butt! I haven't seen this in years!" They used to call it tenderloin, explained Sal Biancardi, a third-generation butcher, and it can be hard to find these days. But not here.

My grandfather, Dominick, the son of an Italian immigrant and his Italian-American wife, had grown up in the Bronx, and he and my grandmother raised their kids there. (While my grandmother is the daughter of Russian immigrants, she's an Italian cook, taught by her mother-in-law.) My generation was raised in the suburbs, but even there, when questions like "Where'd ya get the meat?" (or the raviolis, or the manicotti) were asked, the answer was usually "Arthur Avenue."

Dominick, who is 89, recalled that he first went to Teitel Bros., a wholesaler and retailer of Italian products from beans and olive oil to spices and tomatoes, around 1932. He didn't live especially close to Belmont — he remembers taking a streetcar with his mother to get there — but even back then, when the borough was full of Italians, it was the place to go.

In recent years, the area has been getting more attention. NYC & Company, the city's tourism arm, marketed it as part of its "Visit 9 in '09" campaign. The annual Ferragosto street fair, held this year on Sept. 11, has grown from drawing a few thousand to around 17,000 last year. And then there's the app.

But merchants promise that most of their clientele are still people who grew up in Belmont or whose parents used to live there, even though few Italian-Americans are still residents. They report seeing a panoply of license plates each Saturday — from Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont — as folks fill their trunks with delicacies and necessities for the week.

A few hours on Arthur Avenue — and some innocent questions — will bear out that merchants are not focused on, and are even charmingly unprepared for, tourists.

A query about the differences among sausages with long Italian names in one store, for instance, only revealed what was already apparent: Some were thick and some were thin.

A friend remembers once visiting a shop and eagerly asking what kind of ravioli they had, anticipating pasta made with pumpkin or sage like one might see at an upscale market.

Meat and cheese, the answer came back. She pressed. Meat and cheese, the salesman deadpanned again. While Arthur Avenue has benefited from the general rise of Italian cuisine — Chris Borgatti of the renowned fresh pasta purveyor Borgatti's declares, "Italian food has surpassed French food" — it is not of the trend.

Most of the shoppers on Arthur Avenue, in other words, know what cervellata is (a kind of sausage, made with lamb at Peter's Meat Market). And they like their ravioli with either meat or cheese. (Borgatti's, though, does have a variety with spinach.)

Jerome Raguso, of Gino's Pastry Shop, calls the neighborhood a "family reunion."

One of the joys to a visitor is observing those intimacies of customer and merchant.

The other, of course, is eating. A conversation about Arthur Avenue is a conversation about food, and it can be hard to go without getting requests. A Scottish friend who went with me once loves the savory biscotti from Madonia Brothers bakery — made from their famous olive or multigrain breads and laced with rock salt. A neighbor of my parents put in an order for unsalted ricotta, made fresh daily (as is the mozzarella) at Calandra's cheese shop.

Sal Biancardi remembers a call from a woman in California looking for a sausage she remembered from her childhood. Did they still make it? They did, and it was on a plane shortly thereafter.

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Little Fort Atkinson acts bigger

FORT ATKINSON, Wis. — I've been trying to think of the term for that particular experience of entering a seemingly small space only to discover it's much larger. Until I can remember the right word for that phenomenon — if the word really exists — I've taken to calling it the Fort Atkinson Effect, after the place where I experienced it most strongly.

Population: 11,000 or so. But it has an Equity theater that casts in New York, a full-fledged movie studio, a dance floor worthy of Fred and Ginger, an 8-mile bike trail with a covered bridge, mysterious Indian mounds, an honest-to-goodness frontier fort, enough bars along Main Street to support the most determined pub crawl, and a warehouse where you can buy art supplies and farm equipment.

In this south-central Wisconsin town on the Rock River, they don't just float your boat; they help you built it. They won't simply fly you up for the bird's-eye view; they'll jump right out of the plane with you.

High points

In any given week, some 7,000 people attend professional, Broadway-style productions at the Fireside Dinner Theatre (800-477-9505, firesidethe

atre.com), where every ticket ($67) includes a meal before the show. The Klopcic family's award-winning restaurant serves a crowd-pleasing menu in the intimacy of multiple small dining rooms. Looking at the outside of this low-slung, barn-red, rambling pyramid, you'd never guess it can seat 1,000 guests at once or that several gift shops are under the same roof.

For the remainder of 2011, "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" runs through Oct. 23 and "A Fireside Christmas," Oct. 27-Dec. 22. The Christian concert series ($35) continues with the Pfeifers Oct. 4-5.

Over at Salty Earth Pictures (414-587-7615, saltyearthpic

tures.org), groups of 10 or more can schedule a behind-the-scenes tour of this working movie studio. The Dove Award-winning "Movie Critters Big Picture" and the feature-length drama "Journey to Paradise" were filmed here. So was the television sitcom "Fifth Pew From the Front."

From the street, the plain-Jane, battleship-gray office front is easy to bypass. But it hides 30,000 square feet of production space, one of the largest independent studios in the United States. During the two-hour tour ($12), owners Steve and Beth Zambo show you around nine soundstages, the props department, and dressing and makeup rooms.

In the 6,000-square-foot Stage 3, your group can participate in a game show or newscast while learning how Hollywood creates special effects. Tours conclude in the Second Take Resale Shop, where proceeds help fund this not-for-profit studio. Its sales floor doubles as a movie set, and the merchandise might have served as props or costumes.

Those who want to push the envelope wind up at AtmosphAIR Skydiving Center (920-568-1700, diveout.com). Owners Bo Babovic, with 12,000 jumps to his credit, and wife, Alex, with 4,000 jumps, take first-time skydivers through a 45-minute ground school where the focus is on preparing for the emotional extremes — raw fear, then bliss — of what they are about to do. Then it's time to suit up and take off ($219).

At optimum altitude, your harness is hooked to your instructor's for a tandem jump, and out you go. The 120 mph free fall lasts about a minute, then the parachute opens for a five-minute canopy ride.

But there's no shame in staying on the ground. Somebody's got to fire up the gas grill and spread the picnic table, which are permanent fixtures on the hangar's back porch.

That Fred-and-Ginger dance floor? It's part of the fine-dining and special-event complex at Central Coast Restaurant (920-568-9695, centralcoastrestaurant.com). Join them for dance lessons on Thursday nights, or just watch from the Vegas-style tiered seating.

Simple pleasures

Fort Atkinson is the southern headquarters of the Glacial Heritage Area Watertrails. Few know its routes better than Kim Grunow, who contributed his expertise to the water trail map. He also knows his way around boat-building and helps others learn the craft at Rock River Canoes (920-723-0657, rockrivercanoe.com). For a decade, he's been milling his own lumber into quarter-inch strips that eventually become canoes or kayaks, depending on each hobbyist's inclinations. Stop by this Main Street storefront-turned-workshop, and you'll see as many as a dozen boats in various stages of construction.

Southwest of town, skirting Lake Koshkonong, 11 effigy (animal-shaped) and conical mounds have stood for perhaps 1,500 years. These 4-foot-high earthworks are preserved in the Jefferson County Indian Mound Site. Inside the city limits along the Rock River, another ancient earthwork, the Panther Intaglio (an excavated hollow), is considered North America's only intact intaglio.

Then there's 1832 Fort Koshkonong. Its reconstructed wooden palisades and watchtowers, open year round, become the scene of the old fur-trading days during Buckskinner's Rendezvous.

So you see what I mean: That's a long list for a little town. There's more to see and do in Fort Atkinson, but this'll get you started.

If you go

Getting there

Fort Atkinson is 115 miles from Chicago via U.S. Highway 12.

Staying there

Chains include Holiday Inn Express (920-563-3600, holidayinn.com) and American's Best Value Inn (920-563-6444, abvicourtyardinn.com). B&Bs include Kosh's Lake View B&B (920-563-7476, koshslakeview.com) and Lamp Post Inn B&B (920-563-6561, thelamppostinn.com).

Information

Fort Atkinson Chamber of Commerce: 888-SEE-FORT, fortchamber.com.

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