The user interfaces are poor because the quality of the underlying data is poor. The GDS I worked with simply did not offer any useful queries so it was impossi

The user interfaces are poor because the quality of the underlying data is poor. The GDS I worked with simply did not offer any useful queries so it was impossible to get good results. A GDS usually charges per request so it quickly gets expensive and slow to aggregate multiple queries into a view that would be useful to the user. Also the terms and conditions of a GDS usually prohibits caching that could be used to make the user experience fast and inexpensive. Finally the pricing models are non-intuitive and different airlines have different administrators who all type in their respective pricing slightly differently. To get the the best prices you have to tune each query to the particular style used by the administrator.