the worlds first airline to offer "priority booking". For a small fee, you are given access to the old booking engine
A bit surrealistic approach, but... who knows? Good as joke, anyway.
The software provider Navitaire has moved to .NET 2.0 framework and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise but that has failed to provide more efficiency and caused persistent hobbling of the booking system. There might be some disharmony in relation to the inflated hardware needs caused by the migration, but I suspect many more reasons of the malfunctioning. As a self-educated C++ programmer (just a part-time activity of mine) I would rather turn my suspicions into a lack of a programming algorhythm that would allow to speed up the tasks and lessen the use of hardware resources. Especially the price searches seem to consume much of the computing power. I cannot blame the hardware-hungry M$ technology alone, in fact the new SQL Server allows things like creation of a hot standby database that maintains close synchronization with a primary database, they could make use of it. I could envisage e.g. using a secondary "price" server just to perform actual price searches without burdening the main booking system with other tasks than solely bookings. Or, alternatively, some better price-indexing solutions could be deployed to improve the searches. I do not want to go further into the subject but hope to see the end of this disgrace for both Navitaire and Ryanair.