As someone who worked with the guy being mentioned and has heard some of the stories: It is indeed INCREDIBLY difficult to create this service, for a multitude

As someone who worked with the guy being mentioned and has heard some of the stories: It is indeed INCREDIBLY difficult to create this service, for a multitude of reasons. Ones that I can remember off the top of my head: - Every company with flight information is insanely possessive of this information. It can take a long time to actually gain access to it. - The information might be stored on literal magnetic tape, so you need to have a reader for that to even access flight information. (and they're not cheap) - The rules for everything are insane, and completely different across every flight provider. Stuff like a ticket number/ID/whatever it was has complex rules built into it to understand what they mean. - The search space for figuring out an optimal flight from Point A to Point B is VERY complex. He described it as almost driving their most talented engineer insane from trying to figure out how to optimize the search and make it actually work well. (and that doesn't even take into account finding the return flight as well) I'm sure there were other things mentioned, but those are the ones I remember. If you want to try to disrupt this space, you'd have to be prepared to invest some good capital into just getting started, on top of actually physically flying to the people who can give you the information you need in order to gain access to it. It will not be easy, and it will not be quick. There's a reason ITA changed the game at the time.