Delta, Northwest Aim To Unify Tech By Early Next Year

The integration of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines has been ongoing for the better part of a year. Perhaps one of the trickier tasks (though maybe not as tricky as combining labor groups) now has a targeted finish line: Delta president Ed Bastian Wednesday said, "We are on schedule to complete our technology cut-over by the end of the first quarter of 2010."
 [more]
Readers of The Beat know that Delta decided to migrate Northwest to Delta's Deltamatic reservation system (operated by Travelport's Worldspan, but on a separate platform), after thoroughly considering a full switchover to Northwest's Pars system (which is a partition within Worldspan itself). That decision, according to Delta in October, came after the airline "found that the Pars hybrid system was going to be too costly and take too long to cut over to one system. In the end, the transition to Pars turned out to be more complex than we had originally believed. And by choosing Deltamatic, we remain on the same integration schedule."

Given the numerous challenges that always seem to pop up during large-scale airline IT projects, we are eager to find out more. Delta PR today has not yet responded to our inquiry. When we do get a status report, we'll pass it along.