The airline industry’s Internet travel service, dubbed T2 when it was announced in November, appears to be on schedule to meet its late-summer launch date despite opposition from travel agent organizations and an investigation by the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department.
But the newly named Orbitz travel service apparently isn’t taking any chances that the site, bankrolled by five of the nation’s biggest airlines–United, American, Delta, Continental and Northwest–will get hung up before it goes on-line.
In a nod to Justice officials, the Chicago-based company has hired an outspoken aviation critic to help ensure Orbitz delivers what it has been promising since T2 was announced–an unbiased travel site where consumers can be assured they are receiving unbiased airline, hotel and car rental information.
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The company said Cornish Hitchcock, who has served as director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project and worked for Public Citizen, both of which are Washington-based lobbying organizations, will organize and chair the consumer advisory panel that will keep tabs on the site’s operations.
Current reservations systems, including those operated by the nation’s airlines and other on-line systems, are based upon airline-owned computer reservations systems developed during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Those systems, despite efforts by government regulators to ensure fairness, present travel information in a biased manner, Orbitz officials say.
A total of 28 domestic and international airlines already have agreed to provide flight data, including fares that generally can be obtained only on their individual Web sites.
In addition to the financial backing from the five-largest domestic airlines, the full-service travel site said it has received agreements from six other domestic airlines–Hawaiian, Midway, Midwest Express, Spirit, US Airways and Vanguard.
Additional airlines are expected to sign up for the service.
Mullin urges expansion: For years, Leo Mullin was careful not to offend anyone in the Chicago area. After all, his employer, First Chicago Corp., where he was president, and Unicom Corp., where he was vice chairman, could have suffered.
Now Mullin is chairman and chief executive of the world’s third-biggest airline–Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines. He no longer commutes from Chicago to his office near Hartsfield International Airport.
Therefore it should not be a surprise that Mullin backs an expansion of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. While Delta is a minor player at O’Hare, Mullin told the Metropolitan Planning Council this week that Chicago needs to get to work to increase the capacity at O’Hare just as Atlanta now is doing at Hartsfield.
But he stopped short of backing construction of an additional runway or reconfiguring the airport’s existing seven runways. Leaders of the two largest airlines using O’Hare, United and American, are backing plans for a new runway.
E-ticket link: United Airlines, which two years ago broadcast its plans to develop an electronic interline ticketing service with rival American Airlines, conceded this week that effort no longer is on the airline’s front burner.
Instead, the carrier announced that it has developed an interline service with Air Canada, which happens to be a member of the United-dominated Star Alliance and is not a competitor.
The service makes it possible for customers who are bumped from one airline’s flights to be rebooked on a cooperating carrier’s flights without having to go through the time-consuming process of obtaining a paper ticket at a boarding gate.
“Today we enter the final frontier of making electronic ticketing universally accessible,” said Chris Bowers, United’s senior vice president for North America.
Creating an interline process is important because of the increasing numbers of passengers who are flying with electronic tickets.
Last month, more than 60 percent of United’s tickets were electronic.
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