Stories about: Northwest Airlines

Companies like Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and the makers of Motrin have all learned the hard way that online assaults from external users on Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Twitter can damage their brands.

E-commerce leaders have joined together to try to protect Internet users from deceptive online ads.

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.

A silver lining for Accenture amid a weak IT spending environment has been strong growth in the so-called business process outsourcing (BPO) market, in which companies offload to a third party management of business functions such as accounts payable or human resources.

US travel technology company Worldspan LP has signed a five-year contract worth over US$350 million with IBM Corp. to update its system, it announced Tuesday.

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.

Unisys and three major airlines are working together to launch the Unisys Cargo Portal Services, an Internet portal that will make it easier for freight forwarders to do business with the air carriers.

Almost a year after the government gave it the green light to launch, Orbitz LLC is again under federal scrutiny following pressure from competitors that say the online site has unfair direct access to airline bargains.

Web analytics -- software that tracks user behavior on a Web site -- is, in theory, not that far removed from the BI (business intelligence) products that have been around for much longer. Both aggregate data and perform statistical analyses to produce reports that tell how well or poorly things are going.

Online travel vendor Orbitz.com has for the first time begun charging a service fee to customers buying airline tickets from its Web site.

The U.S. Secretary of Transportation's Rapid Response Team on air travel security late Friday made public a set of recommendations that build on President George W. Bush's Sept. 27 call to make commercial airports and airliners more secure against terrorism.