In 2000, Roger Liew became employee No. 5 of Orbitz, the airline-owned website that was to launch the following year.
In the seemingly irrational world of travel technology, with its mainframe computers, EDIFACT messaging and incompatible legacy systems, Liew and the 14 other technophiles who became Orbitz’s first employees had a few things going for them in addition to their MIT degrees.
“Our advantage was that none of the early people knew anything about travel,” Liew recalls.
Today, Liew is vice president of technology at Orbitz Worldwide. He was detailing his circuitous travel-technology trek at, of all things, an Orbitz summit for bloggers this week at the company’s Chicago headquarters.
In the course of his multi-segment career tour, Liew landed at Orbitz in 2000 as a software guru, moved on about four years later and went to G2 SwitchWorks, and circled back to Orbitz Worldwide some eight months ago, around the time that Barney Harford took over as president and CEO.
Reflecting on the tech challenges he’s faced over the last decade, Liew, adhering to a venerable Chicago tradition, says he realizes he’s been on a mission.
“This doesn’t have to be as hard as it is,” Liew says, referring to the complexity of all those bits and bytes.
Clad in jeans and seemingly with a quip always at the ready, Liew seems a tad nostalgic when he reflects upon the early days at Orbitz.
Although Expedia and Travelocity had about a five-year head-start, Orbitz had some assets, Liew remembers.
“We had a boatload of money,” he boasts.
And, among the first purchases was about $5 million worth of application servers.
“The challenge was what to do with all the stuff that we’d bought,” Liew says.
However, it wasn’t all fun and games with those big budgets.
Liew says the team worked 100-hour weeks during the three months before the Orbitz launch in June 2001, and he recalls shop talk about the need to automate tooth-brushing functions.
The geek crew labored for part of the first year to ensure that the air-shopping engine from vendor ITA Software was functioning properly, Liew says.
“Some people were saying ITA doesn’t work,” Liew recalls, and there were pitched debates between Sabre, Orbitz and others over which air-shopping engine turned up the most useful, practical results.
Use of ITA was a key differentiator for Orbitz because unlike the flight-search engines used by its competitors, ITA went beyond the global distribution systems to gather data on flight combinations.
And, Orbitz soon was turning into an air-ticket machine, according to Liew.
At one point in the early days, Orbitz, which hosted back-end systems for American and Northwest Airlines in addition to selling flights on its own, was processing “more tickets than anyone else,” Liew claims.
Liew explains that the American Airlines system interfaced with Orbitz before touching the Sabre host system, and that technicians at the airline expressed a preference to discuss technical problems with the staff at Orbitz rather than with the Sabre team.
By 2004, the US Dept of Transportation deregulated the global distribution systems and Liew exited Orbitz along with employee No. 1, chief technology officer Alex Zoghlin, who was the first person to be hired.
On their new mission, Zoghlin, Liew and other Orbitz expatriates set out to build a new GDS from scratch at G2 SwitchWorks. Such a task had not been attempted since the 1980s and the project turned out to be much more difficult than envisioned, Liew says.
When G2 SwitchWorks would attempt to hook up with an airline, Liew says, G2 would realize that the airline generally would know that its system operated well enough, but the carrier often couldn’t explain know how its system worked.
“Each connection took about a year,” says Liew, who acknowledges that G2 ended up writing lots of code for airlines and travel agencies.
Faced with a full-court press from the GDSs and used as somewhat of a pawn by the airlines in their full-content negotiations of several years ago with Sabre, Amadeus, Galileo and Worldspan, G2’s GDS-creation scheme morphed into a scaled-down plan to build an alternate distribution system of sorts. Travelport bought G2’s assets in 2008 and today is using some of its technology for travel agency desktop development.
Back at Orbitz Worldwide now, Liew says the company wants to build on those earlier, daunting connectivity problems. Orbitz “ultimately” wants to open up its APIs to smaller companies to tap into their software-writing creativity, whether it is for mobile or other applications, he says.
Of course, Liew notes, Orbitz has to figure out the proper balance for such API access because queries into the Orbitz system come at a cost.
Liew's discussion of opening Orbitz up to code-writers came on the same day that TripIt, the post-trip management firm, revealed that its developer network had gone live.
Liew notes that TripIt has one less hurdle to clear than Orbitz on this front: TripIt, he says, “doesn’t have to touch legacy systems.”
In contrast, for Orbitz, the fact that it must interface with old-school airline and travel-agency systems makes for much complexity and hassle.
And, drawing on his own legacy and experience in that regard, Employee No. 5 knows the challenges all too well.