The latter company provides aviation services, such as managing an airline's inventory or overhauling its jets' landing gear.
That failure left investors wondering whether the site's patented business model can be applied successfully to anything beyond distressed airline seat inventories.
He noted that ExpertFlyer.com, which keeps track of airlines' seat inventories, is a useful tool for tracking award availability.
Early last year, Bill Owen, a schedule planner at Southwest, wrote in a post that the airline sold its inventory only three months in advance.
Sun also developed Java to enable a return to simpler and cheaper terminal-like network devices, particularly for database inquiry systems—such as airline reservation systems, inventory control systems, and Internet television devices but also for use in personal digital assistants (PDAs) and various automotive and household appliance interfaces as well.
Future plans include expanding the service's airline and destination inventory as soon as the Adioso platform has stabilized, currently Adioso only covers a selection of airlines in Australia (the home country of founders Howard and Fenn Bailey), Asia, Europe and the USA.
That is especially true if airlines continue to shrink the number of flights, because the block-purchase model depends on the airlines' having excess inventory to sell cheaply.
Whether these subscription programs will prevent elite travelers (without subscriptions) who book last-minute tickets from scoring preferred coach seats will depend on how well the airlines manage that inventory.
Avolo expects to set up auctions and a leasing service; next year they plan to offer tools to help airlines better track inventory needs.
GDS's are a centralized data warehouse where all of the airlines push their inventory data in order to best coordinate all supply information, including routes and pricing.
There are more options available on the opaque sites as travel businesses find themselves with unsold rooms, empty airline seats or other inventory even on peak travel dates.
