On the surface, a partnership between Sabre and British Airways this week indicated that the airline would be handing over much of its airport customer handling technology to a new provider.

The deal sees BA use a product from Sabre Airline Solutions known as Qik Develop Tool which will allow airport employees to gather information about booked passengers and assist with terminal-to-aircraft workflow.

In short: rather helpful technology, it appears, to handle the multi-channel/platform systems now used by both people on the ground as well as customers.

Qik is already used by Lufthansa, South Africa Airways, Air New Zealand, Southwest Airlines and Thai Airways.

Kicking about behind the scenes, however, is Amadeus.

British Airways uses the Amadeus Altea Reservation and Inventory system as well as other technology to handle the airline’s existing Departure Control process.

The partnership, which has been in place as part of a wider IT agreement signed in March 2008 for ten years, will also see BA migrate its Departure Control and customer management technology to the Altea system.

Confused about how the Sabre system fits in, then?

It turns out that being developed alongside the existing Altea system is additional technology, namely the Qik system, to run “airport and ramp interfaces” – in other words: the passenger recognition system.

For its part, Sabre says:

“Sabre Qik Solution is one of many solutions we have developed to help airlines increase productivity, reduce costs and increase revenues. We are pleased that we can drive significant incremental value above what the airline uses today. It’s such flexible technology that it will adapt to any reservations system to create a custom point of sale and service for airlines.”

Amadeus adds:

“This agreement is the continuation of the strategic arrangement which started in 2000 between the two companies, designed to provide British Airways with a next generation technology platform for the management of passenger services.”

Who ever said technology simplifies the travel industry…

Just when flights were getting back to normal following the European volcanic ash drama, British Airways has been forced to defend complicated methods used to get passengers home.

Some passengers have called into question the airline’s practice of hiking up prices of empty seats on flights despite thousands of passengers remaining overseas and still unsure as to when they can get home.

It turns out that the BA reservation system used to sell and allocate seats is to blame, forcing the airline to use a convoluted process to ensure it can re-assign places to stranded customers in places as widespread as Antigua/St Kitts, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Dubai, Delhi, The Maldives, New York and Sharm el Sheikh.

BA is unable to remove available seats from the system and hand them out to those stuck around the world.

This is because it has agreements with various intermediaries -- namely, travel agents in the business and leisure sector and other airlines -- to keep empty seats open on the system.

To get around this the airline has simply put up the price of each seat to (hopefully) put off agents from re-selling the fare.

A BA official is unable to confirm how much tickets were raised, but says it was “substantial”. Reports have suggested some fares were increased to as high as £4,700.

The airline has denied the inevitable accusations of profiteering.

An official continues:

This was the only technical solution we had available to us to help rebook as many of our own customers as we possibly could onto each flight.

But fearing a PR backlash -- on top of the countless other problems the airline has faced in recent months -- chief executive Willie Walsh even posted a video to YouTube last night to explain the issue.

What’s next for ITA Software?

The Cambridge, Mass., travel technology firm has a thriving airfare pricing and shopping business, as evidenced by its recent QPX deals with Southwest Airlines and Air Canada.

But with half of ITA’s employees working on its fledgling airline reservations and departure control system, one technology consultant, who closely follows the company, terms ITA’s loss of the Air Canada reservations system project “a debacle” and says it is an open question whether ITA, now without any customers for this product, has a place in the airline res system market at all.

After all, ITA was not a finalist when American Airlines recently selected HP and its still-to-be built Jetstream passenger services system over the Amadeus Altea platform as a replacement for longtime host Sabre.

ITA co-founder and CEO Jeremy Wertheimer says the company’s airline res system isn’t in production, but “is working,” runs at full scale and “is pretty close to done,” adding that the departure control system needs “more work.”

“We’re talking to all people who want a system and we’re looking to a brave few who want to be early adopters,” Wertheimer says.

Wertheimer contrasts the status of ITA’s  res system with competitors’ “usually broad pronouncements [when] not much has happened.”

In addition to Jetstream, perhaps he is referring to a 2005 United Airlines-Amadeus declaration that the airline would scrap Travelport’s Apollo res system for Altea. That transition remains on hiatus.

Wertheimer says ITA had a busy summer talking to potential airline customers, which sometimes use 50-year-old legacy systems, about deploying ITA’s  full-blown res system, components of the system, or apps.

“It’s not the sort of thing where you show up on a Monday and you have a sale by Friday,” Wertheimer says. “We are working hard to get other customers in the pipeline.”

Wertheimer declines to say whether ITA is profitable, and it would be hard to imagine it is, given all of the resources it is pouring into its res system business.

Still, with ITA’s QPX business humming along, and considering the $100 millon in funding it attracted three years ago, it would be surprising — despite the Air Canada setback — if ITA were facing a cash crunch.

Speaking of  what he calls that “pile of money,” which came from venture capitalists, Wertheimer claims, “we really haven’t used it.”

So, as ITA woos res system customers, it is continuing to build out its QPX business, with new solutions for airline merchandising efforts in the works.

Asked how significant the merchandising business might be for ITA, Wertheimer says, “I don’t think anyone knows the precise shape of it.”

Pursuing the merchandising angle puts ITA into competition with numerous entities, including the airline solutions units of the GDSs, as well as companies like iSeatz, which offers merchandising solutions for Delta and Air France-KLM.

Companies like iSeatz and Viator provide destination activity options to airlines or online travel agencies, and ITA is getting into that arena, as well, as it refines its airfare shopping business as evidenced here.

One of the newest wrinkles is the “Needle,” an internal name for a platform that facilitates the collection of data about destination activities from myriad sources ranging from the Web to company spreadsheets.

Here’s an example of a prototype Needle activities solution from ITA which may appear on some airline websites one of these days:

When you click on one of the above events near an airport destination, you get event details and the name of source websites such as Stubhub.com.

ITA spokeswoman Cara Kretz says the Needle “uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to extract data not only from discrete fields or tables, but from within fields, across fields, and from regularly formatted text of all kinds. It then automatically restructures the extracted data to match the schema of your target database. Once learned by the system, a data source can be routinely re-acquired without manual intervention.”

Despite my, ahem, needling, Kretz declines to divulge details on the product’s commercial name, pricing or business model.

For ITA, the Needle and its still-unproven airline-res system business are all part of the company’s evolution.

Now, it’s time to see whether ITA management is as adept at business as it is at technology solutions.