Orbitz pushes programming stratosphere

Seems travel site Orbitz is beginning to add (in a small way) analytics to their ticket sales aggregation. I requested possible flights to London. The resulting menu of possible flights came back, topped by this new factoid: “Lowest fare below beats this trip’s 30-day average by $15.” This isn’t much on its own, since we don’t know whether the average is calculated from a) what people have paid b) the lowest offers or c) all ticket prices. (My bet is b.) In any case, the calculation represents Orbitz’ first step beyond pure reitteration of traditional travel functionality.

Application service providers start off selling an Internet enabled version of a traditional software service, but really come into their own when they leverage their meta view and massive data stream and layer automated consulting on top of the traditional service.