Orbitz: An Airline-Owned Launch, Phantom Springsteen Tickets and Skiplagged

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Orbitz incorporated in 2000 and launched in June 2001, built by airlines that together controlled 75 percent of the U.S. air travel market, and Nielsen NetRatings called it the biggest e-commerce launch in history. Competitors raised antitrust alarms, but the Department of Transportation and, in 2003, the Department of Justice found no evidence of price fixing, reasoning that showing fares side by side made the market more transparent. Orbitz went public in December 2003 at $26 a share, with airlines still holding 70 percent of the stock and over 90 percent of the voting power. Cendant bought it for $1.25 billion in September 2004, Blackstone bought Cendant's Travelport unit, including Orbitz, for $4.3 billion in cash in 2006, Travelport spun Orbitz off in a 2007 IPO, and Expedia bought it for $1.6 billion in 2015, days after buying Travelocity.

Behind the search box, Orbitz ran clustered servers on Red Hat Linux, Solaris and JBoss, and licensed ITA Software's QPX fare engine, written in Lisp, while pioneering complex event processing and releasing some of that code as open source. In December 2010 American Airlines, pushing its AA Direct Connect system, pulled its fares from Orbitz and posted a YouTube video mocking the site, until an Illinois court ordered the fares restored. A 2009 Senate Commerce Committee inquiry examined Orbitz passing card data to post-transaction marketers, and New Jersey sued over tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert that did not exist; Orbitz won summary judgment under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In 2014 Orbitz and United Airlines sued 22-year-old Aktarer Zaman, founder of Skiplagged, over hidden-city ticketing, and the suit was dismissed.

• Airlines created Orbitz to bypass the fees they paid travel agents and existing computer reservation systems.
• QPX's Lisp code handled recursive algorithms well, letting Orbitz weigh millions of routing and price combinations in a fraction of a second.
• Orbitz moved its international brands onto one common technology platform handling different languages, markets and currencies.
• Hidden-city ticketing means buying a cheaper connecting fare and leaving at the layover city, carrying only a backpack.
• In 2011 Orbitz called a Media Matters boycott campaign tied to its advertising placement a smear campaign.