First up, LateRooms had a troublesome time – site ups and downs – for the best part of March 2. No official word from them on this.

Low-cost darling Southwest experienced a double whammy when some 300 flights were affected by a 90-minute communications outage.

At the same time, the brand new Rapid Rewards Plus frequent flyer program was experiencing some difficulties with zero balances and slow responses.

Technology at Virgin Blue was again the culprit for an outage that occurred on Feb 20. However the problem was not related to the actual reservation system but a communications switch.

Nevethless the system went down and hundreds of passengers were affected. Virgin Blue has had its fair amount of troubles with technology infrastructure over the past two years, including several widely publicized problems, with check in and the reservations system.

Travel technology is incredibly complex, there is an expectation that the “stuff” at the back should just work 24-7 without a hitch and be simple and easy to use.

After all, isn’t an airline just a glorified bus company and a hotel – how hard can it be?

The problems that those of us that have to manage technology is that the processes and the demands are not simple.

Disagree? Just start with a clean sheet of paper and try and work out how many questions and possible answers you can get for a simple trip from, say, Los Angeles to San Francisco?

Just figure out how long it would take you to find the answer is you had no search engine and no websites to get the information. We take much of this for granted and then we groan when it falls over.

The legacy systems on which travel processes rely have been around for decades. Yes they creak and they are not the most efficient.

Is that an argument to give them a little leniency? Is that further an excuse to keep the status quo and not challenge it?

I believe we are at a pivotal point in travel technology. The demands on the infrastructure are about to get even more diverse and severe.

An appworld – which some are predicting will become our future – will bring many of these legacy systems to their knees.

A recent article from a software engineer (a code jockey if you will) resulted in an outpouring of his fellow coders, after suggesting world runs on bad software… and actually he is right.

But he has a point – much of the industry’s software is a result of compromise.

The balance of meeting the (often badly defined) requirements of the job at hand and writing good code in the right time at an acceptable price.

In fact, there are projects in recent years at two major travel companies which are believed to have cost millions in over-runs.

What to do? This is the age old problem of time, effort and money, and the eternal triangle of any project has to be defined better.

Travel is complicated and the number of projects I have been involved in that were ill defined have problem triggered the grey hair I now possess!

The biggest battle is that the assumption that travel – or any component thereof – is not complex. The outages we have seen are actually quite normal. Just like earthquakes occur so frequently.

So next time you hear of an outage, have a heart and think of the reasons why and what can be done.

Then reflect. If you have any input into technology – as most Tnooz readers do – then do your part and make a better job of defining the requirements, and a better job of executing the code.

The carrier took its IT platform offline for a few hours to “return to its primary operating system” following a major outage which caused chaos for passengers and flight schedules last week.

The first systems to be restored included telephone and web booking with web, self and mobile check-in expected later on today.

The procedure comes after systems operated by Accenture-owned Navitaire collapsed at the airline, the second such incident in the space of three months.

Virgin Blue CEO John Borghetti says an action plan to solve the recent IT issues had been put in place and problems were now “identified and solved”.

The reason for today’s outage was to roll back to the original primary system.

Navitaire has still not responded to queries regarding recent problems (including a similar outage at Ryanair), but CEO John Dabkowski says via a Virgin Blue statement that the company “regretted” the incident and its main priority is to “ensure smooth running and seamless running” of the airline’s IT.

The airline says the problems took place on September 20 when at 10:45 BST the Navitaire technology “experienced a technical breakdown”.

An official says online check-in was unavailable for over six hours (restored at 17:00 BST) and bookings could not be taken for a further three hours until 20:00 BST.

Ryanair says it currently has no further details or comment to make about the incident.

The news comes during an unfortunate week for the Accenture-owned Navitaire.

The airline system provider drew an angry response from Asia-Pacific low cost carrier Virgin Blue earlier this week after various services it provides collapsed, stranding thousands of passengers at airports and causing huge disruption to services.

It was the second such incident at Virgin Blue in the space of three months, after a similar outage in June, leading the airline to highlight how Navitaire had supposedly not adhered to existing mission critical service agreements.

Navitaire has not responded to questions about the latest incident with Ryanair. Earlier this week it would not comment or even acknowledge the problems at Virgin Blue.

The latest incident began early yesterday (Sunday 26 Sept) when a hardware failure and subsequent outage of the airline’s internet booking, reservations, check-in and boarding systems affected around 50,000 passengers and 400 flights.

The airline’s check-in and online booking systems were not fully operational until around 21 hours later, in the early hours of today.

Predictably the airline is not at all happy and has singled out Navitaire for criticism.

Officials say:

“We are advised by Navitaire that while they were able to isolate the point of failure to the device in question relatively quickly, an initial decision to seek to repair the device proved less than fruitful and also contributed to the delay in initiating a cutover to a contingency hardware platform.”

Virgin Blue has also highlighted how its service agreement with Navitaire requires “mission critical system outages” to be sorted out within a short period of time.

“This did not happen in this instance,” an official statement says pointedly. The airline says it was assured by Navitaire that the incident is being investigated thoroughly.

However, this is not the first time Navitaire is facing tough questions from the same customer.

Just three months ago, shortly after a widely puffed overhaul of the system by Navitaire, reservation systems failed for several hours, once again causing delays and disruption at Australian airports.

Accenture-owned Navitaire is staying extremely tight lipped about the latest failure of its IT systems, refusing to comment at all today from either its Australian and US bases.

In fact, communication ended when Navitaire was asked to simply acknowledge that the incident took place.

In October 2009, Air New Zealand suffered a similar incident when an IBM-run IT system failed and the airline experienced massive disruption across its network.

The campaign is designed to only highlight the functionality on the app rather than the core routes or aircraft of the airline, a rare promotional tool in travel but one which is expected to increase over time.

Virgin Blue says the app – developed by Ireland-based Mobile Travel Technologies – is an important element in its battle to lure business travellers to airline.

Passengers are able to book flights, change itineraries, check-in and secure a mobile boarding pass via a device, a process as yet not taken on by other airlines in the Australian marketplace.

The most important part is that the app is designed for Blackberry users, a core device for to many of the business travellers Virgin Blue is targeting.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_xtHIRYlk

Virgin Blue’s New Skies internal reservations system from Navitaire reportedly crashed for several hours June 18, causing flight delays and disruptions at Australian airports, according to several reports.

Service has been restored, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The outage was a highly embarassing one as the airline distributed a press release two days earlier saying the $8.7 million [$AUS10 million] migration to New Skies had been “completed over two days of the June long-weekend,” ushering in “a whole new class of online service.”

Prior to the outage, the airline’s chief financial officer, Keith Neate, said: “The cutover to New Skies proceeded according to plan. We had a continengent of customer service agents in place at all major Australian domestic airports and I’m really proud to say the cutover was very successful with minimal or no delays to our network or guests.”

That statement turned out to be premature.

Virgin Blue is transitioning from one Navitaire platform to another.

The Australian airline previously had used Navitaire’s Open Skies platform.

The New Skies system, which experienced the shutdown, uses a ticketless model, where funds are tied to a customer record and not an individual ticket.

Among the new features, according to Virgin Blue, customers can compare fares up to 15 days surrounding the day they travel; they can book car rentals and hotels; and they can access booking summaries to better track costs.

The new platform also hosts Pacific Blue and Polynesian Blue.

Migrating from one airline reservations system to another can be a gut-wrenching process.

WestJet experienced much disruption last year when it migrated its internal reservations system from Navitaire to SabreSonic.

As announced previously, the Palo Alto, Calif., firm will be rolling out a Blackbery app, Virgin Blue by WorldMate, in the first quarter which will enable Virgin Blue passengers to book flights and check-in from their Blackberrys.

A second phase of the implementation will involve deeper integration, including push alerts and opportunities for ancillary revenue such as hotel and limo bookings, says Nadav Gur, WorldMate’s founding CEO, who becomes chief commercial officer in the executive maneuverings.

In addition to the Virgin Blue deal, which involves a revenue-share model, Gur says WorldMate is talking to GDSs about joint solutions, has conversations going with major global airlines, and is “a few days away” from announcing an advertising launch where a major a hotel chain and some airlines will advertise on WorldMate’s Symbian app, an operating system used on Ericcson and Nokia phones.

Rest assured that in WorldMate’s GDS discussions, it probably isn’t having much conversation with Sabre, which has its own itinerary-management app in TripCase.

Among the management changes at WorldMate, Jean Tripier, most previously chief operating officer at mobile-solutions provider Good Technology, becomes WorldMate’s new CEO, and Amir Kirshenboim returns to WorldMate as CEO of WorldMate Israel.

WorldMate says Tripier will head negotiations with “top-level brands” on co-branded distribution deals, which WorldMate argues is becoming a trend as travel companies seek to accelerate rollouts of their mobile offerings.

Tripier says a lot of airlines around the world have been building their own mobile apps for the iPhone, but they are short-changing themselves as many business travelers use Blackberrys and smartphones with the Symbian operating system, for instance.

In addition, an airline’s customers usually have relationships with more than one airline, and WorldMate can provide airline customers access to multiple airlines in these cobranded deals.

Says Gur: “Every airline has a line item to do mobile. Then they figure out that it’s complex” and look for solutions and focus on “how do we make this a profit center instead of a cost center.”

WorldMate says 5 million travelers use its personal assistant and hopes the executive changes will boost global expansion.