Keep in mind that the website is not 28 years old. It's the reservation system behind it that was old, and that's not necessarily a big problem in and of itself. You might be surprised at how much ancient software powers things like airlines and banking with nice user interfaces slapped on top. Health care too - maybe you have some experience in that field? yyznomad could probably explain more in detail, but it can be incredibly difficult to replace these things when they're so intertwined with your day-to-day business and you need to preserve and import data from the old system.

AC has gone through plenty of pains implementing Amadeus, and that has been a great success relative to some of these projects. Around a decade ago, WestJet wrote off $50MM or $100MM that it had spent on a new reservations system because they just couldn't get it to work. Just completely walked away from the years of time and huge number of dollars invested.

Has the switch to Amadeus last November resulted in any tangible improvement to your experience booking tickets with AC? I can't think of anything it has done to make my life better. And switching DCS over to Amadeus has made it worse by killing standby.

Anyway, the point is, when the back-end software was first built isn't necessarily a significant indicator of the quality of the experience the end customer will get.