Stories about: Travelocity

Although online travel firms provide more information about their policies and are more responsive to customers, many of them continue to share users' personal information with outside parties, according to the Third Quarter 2005 Online Customer Respect Study of the largest airline and travel firms. The study was conducted by The Customer Respect Group Inc.

After three years of strong, sustained increases, customer satisfaction with e-commerce has declined, according to the University of Michigan's fourth-quarter American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which was released last week.

The JBoss application server and MySQL database will both get a boost from HP as the computer company plans to begin offering technical support for the two open-source projects.

There are dozens of ways to search for flights, and I tried them all. I carefully worked each of the three big Web travel sites at the same time, juggling multiple browser windows. Orbitz's Web site, Sabre Holdings' Travelocity and Expedia's site each offered different results. I tried alternative dates and airports. After more than an hour, I emerged from my office and called in my wife to confirm the final choice, bragging that the savings had been worth the time spent. But when I made that last mouse click to commit the transaction to my credit card, the reservation didn't go through.

New open source databases users seem to blend the fervor of religious converts with the hardheaded realism of IT professionals.

There's a sea change taking place right before our eyes. Real-time (or close to real-time) data access, rather than batched monthly reports derived from a data warehouse, is helping companies tailor business processes to suit customers' evolving needs. And that's only half of the change. The second half is that real-time access across the enterprise is giving companies an enterprise view of aggregated data and what it means.

In the 17 years since I started work in the IT industry, I have seen Internet Protocol (IP) emerge as a myth, develop as a geek-niche, explode onto the business scene and finally become a consumer-friendly shop window open globally, and on a 24/7 basis.

One of the great ironies of modern business is that while it's only natural for companies to cut back and be cautious during market downturns, these are also the times when the greatest competitive gains are usually made.

A lawsuit filed last July by seven major news organizations to stop pop-up online advertising company The Gator Corp. from displaying its ads on their Web sites has been settled, but the outcome has been sealed by the court.

Sabre Holdings Corp. said today that it has completed the initial migration of its massive airfare pricing application to Hewlett-Packard Co.'s NonStop server platform.

The decline in travel brought on by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the weakened economy have forced airlines and travel companies to cut costs wherever they can. As a result, CTOs are using Web services and other technologies as strategic weapons to meet that itinerary. Underscoring the situation's seriousness is the Aug. 12 bankruptcy filing of U.S. Airways, which listed US$7.81 billion in assets and $7.83 billion in liabilities, and the fiscal troubles facing major carrier United Airlines.