I’m a co-founder of ITA Software (now Google Flights), and people often assume that we at ITA thought Sabre and predecessors like the one mentioned here were crap. On the contrary: I, at least, think they were among the greatest software achievements of their era.
What was less impressive was airlines still relying on the same code 40+ years later: the challenge we set for ourselves was to bring the power engendered by all those years of hardware improvement (and Linux boxes vs mainframes) to bear on the travel industry. And we did that successfully for fare search!
We then tried and failed to do the same for the much larger challenge of the reservation system (think airline operating system).
I distinctly remember philg (OP) visiting ITA’s crappy office in Kendall Square circa 1998, telling us we were all wasting our time trying to improve airline IT. In retrospect it’s “a cautionary tale” (quoting Phil’s post): knowledgeable people often overstate the advantages of the incumbents and underplay the value of luck and timing to startups.
ITA Matrix is a great tool for a power user to search for flights, and the time bar view is brilliant. Google's done a pretty good job with Google Flights, but there are still crazy things you can build in ITA Matrix that it's tough to find anywhere else (unless you are/know a travel agent and/or have a GDS). I've said for a while that if Google ever kills off matrix.itasoftware.com I would build a replica.
"Give me a list of all flights originating at LAX, SFO, SEA and terminating at JFK or MIA, with at least one connection in either SLC or MSP with a minimum connection time of 3 hours and include every airline except Delta and Spirit. Do not include results if they require more stops than the minimum possible stops"
Origin: "LAX, SFO, SEA" Destination: "JFK, MIA" Outbound routing codes: "SLC,MSP ~DL,F9+" Outbound extension codes: "MINCONNECT 3:00" Extra stops -> No Extra Stops.
You can also use extension codes to find flights based on duration or number of miles flown.
Edit: Actually a better example to show the power of ITA would be something like "~DL,AA,UA SLC,MSP AA" for the outbound routing code, which says "don't use Delta, American or United for the first segment (to SLC/MSP) and do use American for the second segment (from SLC/MSP)"
This kind of software is what I lump into the category of "just give me regular expressions". There's so many interfaces that would be simplified by (hard!) standardizing textual abbreviations and providing something powerful like regular expressions.
I'm currently shopping for expansion PEX (a.k.a. F1960) fittings and it drives me up a wall when all you want is sizeA: 1", sizeB: 1", typeA: F1960, typeB: MNPT and all you can use is a free text query. Search for '1" F1960 MNPT' or equivalent and you get back all kinds of things that have nothing to do with what you searched for. That's par for the course when businesses don't have what you want and they're trying to give you anything to not have zero results -- but in this case they do have the parts, their crap search just doesn't return them. Try searching for PEX-A vs PEX-B at Home Depot and it's clear many people will accidentally buy the wrong thing.
Airline searches (for me, at least) were very similar. 99% of engines would not give you results spanning across two tickets (no codeshare agreement) or take into account human factors. More recently, search results started to show "pain factor" mostly as an amount of connection time or overall trip time. That (again, for me) is not pain -- pain is connecting in LHR or CDG when you could connect in VIE or WAW. Or worse, getting some flight pushed in your face on a single ticket that has a LHR/LGW transfer vs. two separate tickets in a much smaller airport further east. Similarly, why not offer a plane type filter on every search? Pain is flying on some 20-30 year old airframe on a big airline instead of a Dreamliner on a smaller one. (LOT, if you're interested... :))
I'd argue ITA Matrix serves folks that know airports and aircraft well enough to figure the human factors in their heads (e.g. if you can fly Delta and connect in either AMS or CDG, choose AMS), and just want to find a valid solution set at the lowest price for a query. The lack of split ticketing means you will be protected in the case of a misconnect.
I'd say this is a good case for a declarative language like SQL or Prolog: "just give me X that satisfies Y and Z, I don't care how you get it." Existing search engines either have a painful number of dropdown menus or are free-text only with limited power user features.
Google Flights routinely serves me economy class seats as business or flight prices suddenly change on last screen or you have to call a phone to book...
As someone who worked on timetabling databases and pricing services at Skyscanner, I appreciate just what a phenomenal achievement ITA is. Very well done sir.
There is still so, so much innovation that the flights travel industry is ripe for.
ITA did do a nice job of kicking companies like Sabre and Amadeus into action. I don't know if Sabre ever got there, but Amadeus does now have customers with no transactions flowing through a TPF mainframe, including the reservations part.
I don't know if it's still true. Probably not. But at one point in the past 10 or 15 years I heard the (what seemed to me credible) claim that, taken as a whole, the commercial airline industry had never made money.
The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.
-- Warren Buffett, in the 2007 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter
What was less impressive was airlines still relying on the same code 40+ years later: the challenge we set for ourselves was to bring the power engendered by all those years of hardware improvement (and Linux boxes vs mainframes) to bear on the travel industry. And we did that successfully for fare search!
We then tried and failed to do the same for the much larger challenge of the reservation system (think airline operating system).
I distinctly remember philg (OP) visiting ITA’s crappy office in Kendall Square circa 1998, telling us we were all wasting our time trying to improve airline IT. In retrospect it’s “a cautionary tale” (quoting Phil’s post): knowledgeable people often overstate the advantages of the incumbents and underplay the value of luck and timing to startups.