Airhitch

» see airhitch.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Airhitch sold departure windows. You registered with a region and a stretch of dates, then went to an airport to wait for an airline to have space it was never going to sell. The company called it hitchhiking on commercial jets, and it carried a registered trademark symbol on that word everywhere the word appeared.

Robert Segelbaum started it in 1969, so the thing predates the web by a quarter of a century. The route that mattered was the United States to Western Europe, and the customers were students and backpackers with more weeks than money. At its fullest there were offices in eleven cities, New York and Seattle on one side of the ocean, Amsterdam and Rome on the other, each one running briefings about which flights were worth trying.

The website arrived in the 1990s and the Internet Archive's first capture of airhitch.org is from 7 February 1998, a page of about two kilobytes. By 2008 it had grown into one long page with a cartoon airliner at the top and a text search box powered by PicoSearch, with its general information also offered in French and Italian. Paul Bowles on the difference between a tourist and a traveler sat near the top of it, and Kerouac on the road being life sat a little further down.

~ the record ~

~ the aim room ~

After the operation moved online, almost all of the actual coordination happened in an AOL Instant Messenger chat room. Travelers used their real names in there and the staff used screen names like Airhitch01 and Airhitch08, so a company with a forty-year history was being run, at the customer-facing end, out of a free consumer chat product with numbered accounts.

That is a detail worth keeping, because it is what a low-margin travel business looked like before anybody built it a dashboard. The flight information was whatever the person on shift had heard, and it was passed on live to whoever was logged in. When AIM itself was switched off in December 2017, the room had been empty for the better part of a decade.

~ the name nobody owned ~

By 2000 there were at least two other websites using the Airhitch name, each denying any connection to the other, and the complaints that followed are the sort a budget travel brand collects when its identity is loose: vouchers that did not work, and refund addresses that bounced. Prepaid vouchers were the payment model around then, bought well before any particular flight existed.

The underlying business was dying anyway. By 2006 the price gap that made Airhitch worth the uncertainty had mostly closed, because anyone with a browser could now search fares directly, and the regulars had started helping each other find ordinary cheap tickets instead. The service had been arbitrage on information that was hard to get, and the information stopped being hard to get.

~ the last capture ~

The archive dates this one tightly. On 17 December 2008 airhitch.org is still serving the real site at about five kilobytes. The next capture, on 13 September 2009, is 484 bytes long and says "Click here to proceed." By 16 October 2009 the domain was a German webcam portal, which kept running on it for years, and in 2021 the registrar's own page appeared saying the name had expired.

From Turkey none of this was ever reachable. Airhitch worked on one ocean, between two places that both had empty seats and students with time, and Ankara was not at either end of that. The closest equivalent leaving from here was the long bus to Europe, days of it each way, and people did take that.

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