The day I meet Terry Jones, it’s raining in Dubai. It’s quite a rare occasion. Both.

I had long wanted to meet the man who founded Travelocity in 1996 – a man who started work life as a travel agent and somehow always found himself to be at the right place at the right time for most of his career.

Complaining of a bad back, he tells me he speaks at 30 events a year, talking about “The Business of Innovation” or “Building Digital Relationships with Customers”, and travels more than 200 days a year.

“Before I became a speaker, I had a real job,” he said.

His first real job was as a travel agent. Rejected from the Vietnam War draft because of the same back problem which had returned to plague him in Dubai, the young Jones decided to take a year off travelling with his college room-mate’s father who was a pilot.

“I decided I liked the travel thing,” he said. So he went to night school, learning about ticketing, and worked in a travel agency for five years.

Then he got interested in computers and worked for a company that sold computers to travel agents. That company was called Agency Data Systems which was eventually sold to American Airlines. He then joined the airline as director of product development and later moved to the Sabre division where he worked for 24 years, with the last position being chief information officer.

“They had a product then called Easy Sabre. The travel agents wanted to kill it. Someone said, don’t kill it, give it to Terry, he used to be a travel agent and he knows technology.

“The first thing I did was put it on the internet and called it Travelocity.”

He said that companies such as Travelocity and Orbitz changed the travel industry. They changed everything, he said – pricing, distribution, distribution costs, market share.
Jones ran Travelocity till May 2002, and took it from a team of 10 to a public company with more than $3 billion in travel sales.

Asked how he felt Travelocity was faring these days versus Expedia, he said, “It’s a great company but I think they were doing better off when they were independent.

“Expedia has become a much huger company and Priceline, from an investor point of view, has the best story, the best return on capital.”

Asked if this meant that being independent was better for OTAs – after all, Travelocity is owned by Sabre while Expedia and Priceline are free from airline ownership, Jones said, “Look at how American Airlines is attacking Travelport – through Orbitz.

“I think it’s more complex when you have a GDS owner.”

Calling himself an agent of change, Jones, who is now chairman of Kayak, believes mobile will drive the next big change in the industry. “There will be more smartphones than computers by 2014 and more people will access the internet through mobile than through desktop.

“This will have amazing possibilities for travel.”