Orbitz CEO Touts Travel Tools

Orbitz Worldwide, the longtime No. 3 player in online travel, is revving its engines. After going public in July (for the second time, following a few years of being privately held), it has inched its way up to tie Travelocity for the No. 2 slot behind Expedia, with 27 percent of the domestic online travel agency market, according to Morgan Stanley. While the company, which also owns CheapTickets and Away.com, has enjoyed international growth of around 25 percent a year, the bulk of its business is in the slower-growing U.S. market. Orbitz CEO Steven Barnhart sat down with U.S. News Associate Editor Kimberly Palmer.

Steve Barnhart, CEO of Orbitz Worldwide

What are the biggest challenges to the online travel industry right now?

If you look at the travel industry in general, one of the challenges you see is really for consumers. As planes have gotten more full, as hotels have gotten more full, the logistics of traveling have gotten more difficult. So part of what we try to do is not just book tickets for consumers, but we try to make the travel experience better for them. We do that through two ways. One, OrbitzTLC, is a system that allows us to alert customers if there's an issue with travel, whether their flight is delayed or proactively letting them know there is a transit strike in New York, or whatever. The other thing we launched more recently is OrbitzTLC Traveler Update, which allows travelers to communicate in real time with each other.

Do you worry that the weakening U.S. dollar and possible tightening of consumer spending will lead people will cut back on travel?

I think that consumers are pretty resilient. . . . You will certainly see consumers change their travel, but I don't think Americans and Europeans view travel as discretionary as they used to. It's part of what they do. You'll see people change how they travel. They might not travel as far. They might travel in a different manner. There are lots of ways to change how you travel to accommodate your economic status without giving up travel.

Much of your revenue is from airline tickets. Do you think you need to diversify from that, in case people start flying less?

We're heavily skewed toward airline tickets. Part of that is because tickets are very expensive. If you look at revenue, about 55 percent comes from things other than air—hotels, cars. We've been clearly expanding off of our air business. But the air business, it was our heritage. It's a great business. We don't dislike it, but people on our site buying air tickets also want to buy hotel rooms. . . . As long as consumers are buying tickets, that's fine, we're fine.

They won't be mad at you if their flight is delayed?

Well, they'll be mad at everyone if there's a problem with their flight. But what I'm saying is, [delays] haven't diminished people's appetite to travel and see the world. It makes it more difficult, which is why we're trying to provide tools to make it easier for them, but it hasn't stopped people from traveling.

What makes Orbitz different from the other travel sites, like Expedia and Travelocity? How do you stay competitive?

Our flight search technology is different, and we feel we surface more low fares more often than our key competitors. And we think our search experience is a cleaner, better experience for users. On the hotel side, while we offer reviews, which others offer as well, we try to maintain quality by ensuring people have stayed in the hotel before they write the review. What you really want is people who have stayed there providing a quality review. . . . Once you begin your travel experience, we provide tools that others really don't offer, like OrbitzTLC.

So if someone buys a ticket on Orbitz and then the flight is canceled, how could you help them?

[The passenger] would call us. Our people know how to work with all the airlines. They would contact the carrier and see what options there are with that carrier. We can also work with other carriers. . . . But at the end of the day, we don't fly the airlines, so we have to yield to the reality, whether it's flying or not, but we're in a good position to help consumers understand all their options. We have a team of ex-military air traffic controllers in our offices in Chicago monitoring what's going on around the clock, so we can anticipate weather issues and get to our customers first if we need to book them on a different flight. When the terrorist incidents happened in the U.K., we contacted more than 10,000 of our customers that day by early afternoon and well over 100,000 by the end of the day.