Is Google travel up next?

Is Google building a travel portal? That’s the conclusion of a ZDNet story after Google posted a job opening for a senior account executive for a travel vertical based in Chicago on the job listings site of Mediabistro. “Your main responsibility is to drive new business revenue growth with our Fortune 1,000 advertisers in a specified vertical in one or more regions,” the ad says.

The article suggests that online travel site Orbitz, based in Chicago, could be the online travel agency partner for Google.

“The position, located in Chicago, may involve partnering with one of the large OTAs (Online Travel Agencies). Orbitz (also in Chicago) would make sense due to Ask Jeeves’ relationship with Expedia, and Travelocity’s relationship with Yahoo,” he wrote. “We would presume that Google is not looking to build its own OTA, but the combination of Google’s traffic + inventory from an existing OTA could put pressure on the rest of the OTA industry.”

Read [News.com]