ITA Software Manitowoc WI

Posted by : Elizabeth Millard

Before online travel sites like Orbitz and Travelocity gave ordinary citizens the ability to book their own trips, travel was the domain of agents who were forced to tame an unruly reservation system and track down flights by using, of all things, a printed schedule book. Then came the Internet boom, and with the future of travel e-booking upon us, at the forefront of the trend is Cambridge-based ITA Software, a developer of airline pricing and shopping software. The company's CIO and co-founder, Dave Baggett, talks about life on the software runway.

How did ITA get started in developing such specifically targeted software?

When our founder, Jeremy Wertheimer, was still in college, he had some friends who were travel agents and one day he was looking at their software, and was appalled. They were working on systems that forced them to do all the work, that forced them to learn a lot of cryptic commands, and spend so much time on just navigating through the bad interface. It had been a very impressive system when it was introduced in the late 1960s, but thirty years later, it was just primitive. So, he began writing the code for a program that would be a search engine for airfares, so the travel agents wouldn't have to deal with that clunky system.

Who are your customers?

We target a couple of different areas. ...

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