Originally Posted by drowelf

And as an IT Wonk, the part that I find interesting and would love to know more about is how the integration works? I'd imagine this needs to have some good hooks into the RM/Inventory Management systems in order to make the predictive calls on which customers and which flights are the best candidates for an offer.

Are these system standardized or has each airline rolled their own over the years? I know that there are 2 or 3 Reservation Systems (Sabre and others), but what about the back-ends that deal with this stuff. If standard APIs exist, that makes this much easier for the vendor, but if they have to do an integration exercise with each and every client, that tends to be expensive as additional development effort instead of an install and go type.