Well it bloody well took them long enough. After, what, five-ish years and a rumoured $50 million, Air Canada's little dotcom pipe-dream-in-the-sky is no more. Destina.ca was to be Canada's answer to Orbitz - an airline-owned online travel service for everything in travel, selling not just Air Canada but other carriers as well as hotels, car rentals etc. Theory went, back in the heady days of dotcom mania V1, that they would Rule The World, or at least have real skin in the Canadian online travel game, and then be spun off for untold millions in IPO manna.

Riiiiight.

Well, let's recap, shall we? The site sucked, WestJet wouldn't give them inventory, the marketing was abyssmal, they relied on points-hounds for most of their business, much of their inventory came from competitors, and - oh ya - September 11th took the wind out of AC's sails, just a wee bit (CCAA, anyone? Ringing a bell?).

In some ways it's a shame.Well, for their competitors, anyway. Maintaining some effort on that piece on online silliness meant they diverted some of their under-powered-and-financially-limited-to-begin-with focus from AirCanada.com in order to keep it on life support. Seems like that is finally over.

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