Skift Take
Like or dislike his ideas, and there are plenty of people in each camp, Jim Davidson stirs things up with his advocacy, and the travel industry is a much better enterprise for his presence. Disruption is never neat, and it comes in all shapes, sizes and bobbleheads.
Farelogix CEO Jim Davidson learned persistence and salesmanship from the imperfect contents of a blue suitcase that he lugged door-to-door in his Elmira, New York, neighborhood at age 8 with his dog, Lucky, at his side.
It was the 1960s and Davidson's father, a pressman at Artistic Greeting Cards, would bring home birthday-card rejects that got battered or mangled when they got fed through the plant's folding machine.
The elder Davidson, also named James, instructed his son that "you have to keep going back to make the deal," and the kid-entrepreneur wouldn't take no for an answer when peddling his product in the neighborhood.
"I would wait a couple of days if they said no and go back again," Davidson recalls. "That instilled a lot of the spirit that you just keep doing."
An instigator and proud
Davidson has done a lot of "doing" in the intervening years, and as one of the people trying to jostle the status quo in an-often recalcitrant travel industry, he's going to need that persistence and drive.
CEO of Miami-based Farelogix and, somewhat counterintuitively, former head of Amadeus North America, Davidson is providing technology to help airlines change the way they sell tickets and other flight products to their customers, and along the way he's had some well-chronicled run-ins with Sabre and some travel agencies that deeply desire to blunt new ways of doing business. (Other big travel agencies work with him, but they are reluctant to go public.)
Davidson's Farelogix and many airlines want to personalize the way airline tickets are sold to frequent fl
