biztravel.com

» see biztravel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ten days after the attacks on New York and Washington, a business travel website in Philadelphia turned itself off. Bookings had dropped by as much as seventy percent in a single week, and on 21 September 2001 biztravel.com ceased all operations. There is no version of this story where I was a customer. I was seventeen, in Ankara, and the words "business travel" described a category of adult life I would not reach for another decade. I am writing it because of what it had been selling, which was one of the few genuinely strange ideas anybody had about airline tickets.

The company began in 1995 under the name Middlegate and spent its first year trying to build travel agencies for small offices. By 1996 it had renamed itself after the domain, and the earliest surviving copy of biztravel.com is from 19 October that year. It sold flights and the hotel and car bookings around them, aimed at the kind of traveler who goes to the same four cities over and over, and it kept track of your frequent flyer accounts for you, which in the nineties was a real chore that nobody enjoyed.

In August 1999 Rosenbluth International, an old and large corporate travel agency, acquired it through an affiliate called Rosenbluth Interactive set up for the purpose. That gave biztravel a parent with actual airline relationships, and the following spring it used them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the guarantee ~

On 23 May 2000 biztravel.com started paying customers when their flights ran late. If you bought your ticket through the site on one of the covered airlines and arrived between thirty and sixty minutes behind schedule, you got $100 back. Over an hour and it went to $200. The policy also covered lost luggage, along with smaller failures like a seat assignment that never materialized or a meal the airline had promised and then did not serve. You filed within twenty-four hours, the company told you yes or no within forty-eight, and the money arrived inside three weeks.

The covered carriers were American, Continental, Japan Airlines, British Airways, US Airways and Air France, which meant six airlines had agreed to let a website publicly grade their punctuality and pay cash on the failures. Competitors told the trade press it was a gimmick. It was also, as far as I can tell, the only time in the history of online travel that a booking site put its own money behind someone else's on-time performance, and the payouts reportedly cost less than the business the promise brought in.

~ the trip planner was already off ~

The front page from 13 July 2001 is dated at the top, the way sites did then, and it shows a company in trouble two months before the thing everyone blames. The big feature in the middle of the page is the Express Trip Planner, the one-box widget for picking flights and hotels and cars, and next to its heading the page reads "(disabled *)". The whole interface is drawn and sitting there, with a link off to the advanced planner instead. Whatever had broken or been switched off, the main booking control on the homepage of a booking site had been dead long enough that somebody had edited the label rather than fixed it.

~ the letter ~

By 27 September the site had been replaced with a farewell addressed to "Dear biztravel Customer". It lists the accomplishments first, which is what these letters always do: the customer service, the Biztravel Guarantee, a small business product called biztravel@myCompany, and a mobile service called biztravel unwired. Then the sentence that carries it, which names its cause without flinching: "biztravel has been unable to overcome the challenges of the economic downturn, the ever-increasing economic pressures of the travel industry, and ultimately the further-reduced demand for travel resulting from the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Biztravel therefore ceased all operations on September 21, 2001."

The rest is logistics. If you had a trip booked through them, take it up with the airline or whoever else was holding the reservation, and if none of them could help, there was an email address that would presumably be read by somebody for a while. What the page kept, oddly, was its editorial navigation. The Brancatelli File, MileMaster, The Tactical Traveler, The Travel Technologist, Letter From the Editor. The booking engine was gone and the magazine's table of contents was still bolted to the side of the tombstone.

Rosenbluth International survived its subsidiary by about two and a half years and was sold to American Express in 2003. The domain was in other hands by January 2002, and today biztravel.com belongs to a Disney vacation planner with no connection to any of this.

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