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. 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. In this case it's just lucky that Google owns the infrastructure and has enough enthusiasm internally to keep it going to some extent.īetween ~2000-2010 I worked for an international airline and I can share that we were testing a lot more innovative search interfaces for consumers. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves). It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And while Hipmunk did a good job of being more consumer-friendly and popular than Matrix had been, sadly they didn't gain enough traction to make it as a standalone company, and after being acquired by SAP/Concur, it was shut down last year. Hipmunk, a YC-backed flight search site that launched in 2010, was heavily influenced by the ITA Matrix UI, after co-founder Adam Goldstein had found Matrix to be the best way for him to find flights when travelling around the world for college debating competitions. I once heard that ITA and other consumer-facing flight search companies had tested that kind of UI with ordinary users, but found that not enough people understood or liked it enough for them to justify making it a mainstream interface. It was built by ITA Software in the early-mid 2000s (the earliest mention I can find of it is in 2004 ) to test and showcase the capabilities of their flight search platform. Mar 1, 2012.For those unfamiliar with ITA Matrix, it was for a long time the go-to flight search tool for the most dedicated flight hackers, points hackers, etc.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |