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Site Features:
adequate air fare search. hotels from lodging.com, packages
by site59 and Neat Group, and rental cars from all brands, not just
Cendant properties. You can also purchase retail cruises
from NLG.
Site Report:
Cheaptickets.com is the online cat that has nine lives.
In the last 16 years, this company has been headquartered in Honolulu, Denver, Parsippany (New Jersey), and now Chicago.
Founded in 1986, Cheaptickets was originally a telephone based service that sold consolidator airline tickets to people in California who wanted to travel to Hawaii. The business was good, and it grew quickly. When Cendant purchased Cheaptickets.com in 2001, Cheap Tickets employed more than 1,300 people, and sells an average of one ticket every 0.5 seconds. At that time, the business cost 425 Million dollars for Cendant, and it looked like a steal.
At the time of the purchase, Cheaptickets was a Sabre agency that sold its air tickets online and over their phone service though a hook-up with that GDS. It sold hotels through a private label relationship with Hotels.com. Cheaptickets.com was then rebuilt using the booking engine and travel resources of its affiliated site, Trip.com, and began calling air inventory out of Cendant's Galileo International's Apollo(R) reservations system to search and process travel transactions. The new Cheap Tickets' hotel site has also added inventory and content from Lodging.com to replace Hotels.com.
Although the website was really humming when it was purchased, it appears that it started to slow after the transaction. Perhaps the consolidator deals were no longer easy to source. In any case, the ticket prices on Cheaptickets.com didn't seem to be nearly so cheap anymore. In addition, the front end of the site didn't keep up with the competition at Travelocity and Expedia.
But the folks at Cendant kept at it. Cheaptickets.com was promoted online and offline in a series of commericals starring Megan Mullaley of Will and Grace fame. Unfortunately, the service that at one point had 14 million registed customers never really regained the growth trajectory it had prior to it's acquisition, and Cendant was forced to look elsewhere for the big consumer brand it had hoped Cheaptickets would become.
In the last few months, Cendant acquired online travel vendor Orbitz.com for approximately $1.25 billion. In a prepared statement, Cendant said that, "it will continue to operate CheapTickets.com along with the better-known Orbitz.com brand. Cendant plans to combine the technology platforms and operations of CheapTickets.com and Orbitz.com to form a common platform with Orbitz. The unit will be based in Chicago."
With the new Orbitz platform, Travelsites hopes that Cheaptickets.com will be the place to find cheap airfare online again! Give it a look in a few months. For now, go to Orbitz.
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