Between ~2000-2010 I worked for an international airline and I can share that we were testing a lot more innovative search interfaces for consumers. This was still pretty much the dawn of online ticket sales, and people were still either calling an airline or going though a travel agent. I remember our group for ‘online sales’ was a team of literally ten people and technology was mostly outsourced to vendors so we were initially more of a marketing group. I remember the year we joined we crossed $1M revenue for online ticket sales and that was actually a surprise to a lot of people in the company.

This was my first real job after graduating, and one of my roles was industry research and putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting technology to keep an eye on and when ITA released Matrix we loved it.

Long story short, we wanted to do a lot of things like this, but our airline (and most others) were not developing our own tech and instead using some technology from the major GDS companies (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo). One project I was on was working to try and implement just a basic fuzzy date search (eg +/- 3 days of your preferred date) and our GDS was quoting us something like $3M and 12months to deliver.

Luckily we had an exec who understood business, technology, and design and got resources to build out internal technology team and we started building our own technology that freed us from some of the constraints of GDS to great success!