ITA Software began with the recognition of a complex computing challenge that had plagued the travel industry for decades. In the mid-nineties a group of MIT computer scientists including Jeremy Wertheimer, Dave Baggett, and Carl DeMarken tackled one of the industry's toughest challenges - consistently and accurately finding the lowest available airfares. When ITA debuted its revolutionary airfare pricing and shopping system at an industry conference in 1999, the travel reporter from the Washington Post referred to it as "The Second.com-ing”

This airfare pricing and shopping system quickly gained traction. In 2000, Orbitz selected ITA to power their consumer online travel site. Multiple leading airlines and travel distributors including American Airlines, United Airlines, US Airways, Continental, Alaska Airlines, Farecast and Kayak have since turned to ITA Software for its flexible pricing, shopping, and availability offering. Many others have tried to copy its innovative user interface, and search features with only limited success.

In early 2006, ITA Software secured $100 million in equity investment, the largest New England venture capital deal in five years.  This, combined with its talented staff and cutting-edge technology, has allowed ITA Software to continue solving the most complex problems faced by the travel industry.

ITA Software’s latest innovation is a new passenger reservation management system that delivers unequaled features, flexibility, and freedom for airlines to continuously innovate for their customers by introducing new levels of system architecture and software applications.

ITA Innovations

ITA Software is proud of its culture driven by innovation and product delivery. We have achieved the following industry firsts:

• First to invent and implement an airfare pricing, shopping, and availability management system powerful and scalable enough to support high-volume shopping. This comprehensive system evaluates every reasonable option, no matter how complex the trip, and has virtually changed the way airfare shopping is done online.
• First to create an intuitive and comprehensive display -- the matrix. Customers and competitors have since adapted ITA Software's innovative user interface and search features.
• First to develop dynamic calculation of availability. The DACS system is a completely new and unique way to store, calculate, and distribute seat availability and flight schedule data, and can handle more than one million availability queries per second. DACS is the industry's leading solution for eliminating costly querying.
• First to implement a new air shopping system that converts revenue seats into mileage currency. This technological breakthrough provides optimal cost and demand management, and makes it possible for loyalty members to access all airline seats, including business and first class. Previously, only a limited number of seats were made available to loyalty shoppers.
• First to integrate shopping into online repricing and reissuing transactions (ReShop) - one of the most costly transactions for airlines to manage. ReShop is ITA's innovative solution that lets travelers and agents easily compare new and existing itineraries and shop for the best alternative in a single search - be it partially flown or wholly unflown tickets. ReShop leads the industry in this automated technology, offering a level of shopping sophistication not available elsewhere.