In light of Thursday's news, we thought readers might benefit from reading an interview with ITA Software co-founder Jeremy Wertheimer that took place in September 2009 at The Beat Live
and was published that month in The Beat. The interview occurred a few weeks after Air Canada said it suspended work on a new reservations system constructed by ITA. Wertheimer took questions from Jay Campbell and audience members. He discussed the Air Canada development as well as other topics related to airline technology, faring and merchandizing, the complexities of making things simple, tailored selling by airlines and the point at which consumers get perturbed by too much information...
Campbell: ITA Software and Air Canada were working for many years with a lot of effort and a lot of money to build a host reservations system and you didn't even get to the scariest part, which is actually converting. How far did you get?
Wertheimer: The product is built. The analogy we like to use is, "I built this artificial heart, now it's just a simple matter of doing the heart transplant. Who wants to be first?" In a nice way, we spent a number of years learning exactly what they wanted. They were wonderful teachers, both in terms of what an airline needs and doing that schizophrenic dance of being very new and very forward-thinking in terms of the new things they wanted to do--unbundling and rebundling and having travelers take care of themselves instead of needing the servicing of employees--and also supporting the full range of legacy systems. Plus [they are a] big flag carrier, a big international carrier and the icing on the cake, a member of the Star Alliance, which has its own additional rules--in case you don't have enough. So they were a nice partner and that partnership is still there. We are still working with them and they are still supplying resources to help us. Essentially, the code for the inventory system and res system is done. The departure control system, which is the airport system, we're still working on. We'll be finishing those over the next year. We'll be rolling it out at a certain rate with Air Canada and they'll be making announcements over time. And now we're talking to a number of other airlines about rolling out the whole system or pieces of it.
A traditional inventory system is flexible the way Henry Ford was flexible at the beginning: You can have a car any color as long as it's black. You can have any product you want as long as it has a fare basis code that identifies it, and as long as it is settled a certain way. Our inventory system, when it wakes up has no idea what anything is. You tell it. It is all in data. It is not in software or burned in. So you can say, "This is the kind of product; we only have some number of seats and this is how we sell them. Here is another product called lounge access, keep selling those. Here is a product which is how many skis we can take on the plane and maybe that depends on the plane. Here is a product that is someone else's product, maybe hotel rooms, and here is how you handle that."
UAL Corp. chairman and CEO Glenn Tilton spoke at the airline industry's Wings Club in New York Thursday, and focused his
prepared comments on familiar topics: taxes are excessive, infrastructure is inadequate, regulation is outdated and industry behavior is dysfunctional. He talked about
possible industry consolidation, but was reluctant to answer analysts' and reporters' questions about the
JAL saga beyond saying he hopes it continues to be a distraction for his two primary competitors. Tilton also answered a few questions of mine on corporate accounts and information technology.
WestJet CEO Sean Durfy today acknowledged that the challenges stemming from the
switchover to Sabre's reservation system "are carrying on longer then we originally anticipated."
