Bing starts to work like the ads promised. Sadly though it’s georetarded

Microsoft has rolled out the Bing Travel, the smart grouping feature promoted in its ads and promotional videos that offers grouped hotel ratings, flight prices and more.

The feature has had me confused from the day Bing launched as I was never able to replicate it in testing. As it turns out, despite launching Bing and promoting the feature, Microsoft hadn’t flicked the switch yet.

The first impressions are very good. Bing does replicate what you find on travel sites (Expedia comes to mind), but formats the results in a both visually pleasing, and highly practical way. Notably this is the “decision” engine Microsoft has been promising, and there’s no question that this defines Bing from Google, and in a very good way.

There is one catch though, and for the life of me I completely understand why: Bing travel is georetarded. It’s not forcibly georetarded by IP address, but it is limited to the United States only. It’s not difficult to get around: in the country settings top right, it’s simply a matter of changing your country setting to United States (English), but the why should I have to do this question remains. Certainly Microsoft is aiming for a one stop shop for bookings with Bing (you can book a hotel directly from Bing itself) and that feature becomes limited outside the United States due to local travel relationships (Bing links to Orbitz and Cheaptickets.) However there’s no reason why Bing couldn’t offer the same grouping outside the United States sans booking feature until such time booking relationships were in place.

The depth and quality of the results need to be tested, but at this stage I think Microsoft has a winner. As noted previously, it’s not a Google killer, but it doesn’t have to be. I can even see myself using Bing for making travel plans, and I’m sure others will flock to it as well.