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Comment by atanasb | Hacker News Reader

While this is a step in the right direction it just serves to show how far behind airline companies are in terms of tech. Swapping out passengers on the fly and handing out virtual miles in exchange is seen as "innovative technology"?

Hopefully this will pave the way for technological disruption in the airline business.

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That's a broad brush. Airlines aren't all at the same point in dealing with overbooking.

It's also not a trivial issue given the slim margins and complexity. Consider connecting flights, different fare types (refundable or not, advance purchase, etc). Also, differing aircraft types, how many seats they have, and which crews are qualified to fly them. Oh, and weather.

If you think the root cause is "airline IT is incompetent", you're probably off base. Google paid $700M for a crazy talented company (stuffed full of PhD genius level talent) that did a good job of solving shopping, but failed commercially at solving booking.

I'm not sure I'd call it "failed commercially at solving booking". Google stopped their work on creating a booking system after the acquisition since they were never interested in getting into booking.

They had one small airline (Cape Air) using it for a long time, so I don't quite get your point. It was built, but almost nobody bought it. Google did squash it roughly 2 years after buying ITA, but it was pretty much dead anyway.

I have to admit I don't know this stuff first hand, but based on what I heard, it took quite a while for ITA to be fully "absorbed" into Google, during which time they didn't change much. I also heard that their first customer was more of a pilot or development partner. Also, from what I know about the airline industry, they change very very slowly and it'd take a long time from the time airlines are approached to the time things are actually in production, especially for something this critical.

That's fair. I'm not trying to portray ITA as a failure. Quite the opposite. Trying to say even an elite group of genius talent can't turn the ship quickly. That it's more about legacy thinking than it is about legacy tech.

Airlines and OTA companies could be 10x more innovative with the tech they have now. TPF and other old tech is NOT the barrier.

Which acquisition was this?

Google/ITA. https://www.google.com/press/ita/faq.html

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