Thursday, November 08, 2007

Orbitz: Throwable Flights

I have been booking some flights recently. As usual, I did a first research on Kayak, because its cross-site searching capabilities and of its great interface (at least the best I have seen so far). The flight I selected was sold by Orbitz at a reasonable price, so I just went ahead and clicked on a link on Kayak that took me to Orbitz to complete the reservation.

This is when Orbitz served me this page (click on the image for a larger version):


First, Orbitz is telling that the flight I selected is not available. Why? Other links from Kayak to Orbitz for other flights got me the same error message. Was this a temporary glitch? An evil plan from Orbitz to avoid paying a commission to Kayak?

And have you noticed that error message? What is that java.lang.Throwable? Orbitz must be using some Java infrastructure. And I'll call those throwable flights.