The travel industry is complex and complicated. We could even call it what it really is: messy. Billions of travelers, millions of flights, thousands of hotels, hundreds of countries, dozens of apps per phone, a few major GDS systems and one question for travel technology: how do we connect everything seamlessly? This is a question Switchfly wants to discuss at The Phocuswright Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, November 7-9.

For airlines, flight delays and cancellations for non-weather related reasons are a costly ordeal and a logistical nightmare. These disruptions – known in the industry as “irregular operations” (IROP) – ruin travel plans for hundreds of millions of passengers each year in the US. In the first half of 2017, one in three cancelled flights in the US were due to IROP.