The End of an Era
Gary Potter just posted on the announcement that United Airlines is pulling out of the Apollo GDS. Cendant is certainly showing the appearance of trying to kill off the Galileo/Apollo GDS and this isn't doing anything to refute that idea - when UA declared bankruptcy a couple years ago, we were told that UA represented about 5% of Galileo's revenue. When Cendant acquired Orbitz, it was pretty clear to people at Galileo that Orbitz was the way of the future. The funny thing is that Cendant was supposedly building a low cost hosting service; but apparently that either didn't appeal to UA or the service simply never materialized.
This does seem like a strange thing for UA to do, however, considering that they're trying to emerge from bankruptcy and a migration like this can't be cheap. But UA does seem to be doing a lot of this - the recent decision to drop the baggage handling system at Denver International was also fairly expensive for UA. IANAL, but maybe all these decisions are related to UA being in bankruptcy - is UA gaining some advantage by making expensive decisions while operating under chapter 11?