Skift Special Edition Newsletter: The Definitive Oral History of Online Travel
For the last few months you've likely missed the writing of Skift's star News Editor Dennis Schaal. That's because he's been very busy talking to those who helped lead the online travel revolution 20 years ago.
All that work comes to fruition today with the publication of The Definitive Oral History of Online Travel, a collection of interviews, videos, audio clips, photos, and more recollections of how travel was radically changed in ten short years.
Today's newsletter is devoted entirely to the Oral History. Read it all right now.
Skift Take: Two decades after the birth of online travel, more than two dozen founders and key players exclusively tell Skift how it all happened. This is a story of a history that changed the future of travel forever. Dig in, this will take a while.
The Chronology
We break down the first decade of online travel into chunks that make sense. From the pre-online travel agency days, to the period of pre-burst innovation, to the time of post-burst entrenchment, we tell you what's what. We also call out one leader for seeing things just about everyone else did not.
By the early 1980s, well more than a decade before the arrival of online travel agencies such as Travelocity, Preview Travel, Expedia, Priceline.com, and Hotel Reservations Network, American Airlines' Sabre unit had created a pre-Internet, direct-to-consumer booking tool for flights, hotels and cars called eAAsySabre.
There is a frenzy of activity, creativity and acquisitions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Priceline.com's Name Your Own Price is taking off and major U.S. airlines decide they want to control distribution of flights and get a piece of the action. In the beginning, without the participation of American Airlines, which owned Travelocity, four major carriers create Orbitz, which revolutionizes how consumers search for fares.
AOL's purchase of Time Warner in January of 2000 marked the beginning of the end for the rapid growth of the first generation of Internet companies. It left Priceline.com on the edge of disappearing if they couldn't quickly justify their valuations with revenues and other marks of success. It wasn't the best time to launch an online travel company, either, but Orbitz carried on.
While the first wave of online travel agencies focused on bookings, starting in 1999 with the debut of Sidestep and early 2000 with the launch of TripAdvisor, a torrent of companies entered the market with the heretical notion that they could use a media model to hand off customers to airlines, hotels, and cars for booking, or could make money through user reviews and other content and cash in on advertising.
