The Ticket Chase

With their losses zooming, the airlines are re-examining how their agents find a flight and reserve a seat for a passenger. The process is flat-out too expensive, which is why the airlines are working around privately owned data centers (which store flight and price information for all airlines) and beginning to substitute a system of their own that connects directly to the data centers of individual airlines. In the January issue of IEEE Spectrum, Holli Riebeek covers "The Ticket Chase." She sees airlines on the verge of "huge cost savings" for a system that's in its very early stages and that can do nothing but expand.