These Are the 5 Things That Killed Travelocity

Forgive Travelocity's Roaming Gnome if it screws up its lines one day because it can hardly recognize the once-proud brand that it still represents. Founded in 1996 and for several years the king of the hill among online travel agencies, Travelocity saw competitors -- first Expedia and Hotels.com around 2001 and 2002, and then Priceline and Booking.com a few years later -- pass it by as it utterly failed to reinvigorate itself. Lately it has been subject to parent and IPO-bound Sabre's serial asset sales, and has become a fraction of its former whole-number self. To get a feeling for how far Travelocity has fallen, consider that competitors moaned in the early 2000s that Travelocity wielded a near-monopolistic grip on the all-important Internet powerhouses of the day -- the AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft travel portals. And that when Continental, Delta, Northwest, United and eventually American airlines founded what was to become Orbitz in 2000, the secret codeword for the startup