13-November-2015

INTRODUCTION TO SABRE

Sabre Global Distribution System (GDS), owned by Sabre Holdings, is used by more than 350,000 travel agents around the world with more than 400 airlines, 100,000 hotels, 25 car rental brands, 50 rail providers and 17 cruise lines. The Sabre GDS enables companies such as American Airlines, American Express, BCD Travel, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Hogg Robinson Group (HRG), Expedia, Holiday Autos, Zuji, Last Minute, JetBlue, Get There and Travelocity to search, price, book, and ticket travel services provided by airlines, hotels, car rental companies, rail providers and tour operators.

Sabre Holdings is a travel technology company serving airlines, hotels, online and offline travel agents and travel buyers. The company is organized into three business units:

Sabre Travel Network: global distribution system

Sabre Airline Solutions: airline technology

Sabre Hospitality Solutions: hotel technology solutions

The company headquartered in Southlake, Texas, and has 10,000 employees in 60 locations around the world with datacentres in global locations.

HISTORY

Sabre Holdings' history starts with SABRE (Semi-automated Business Research Environment), a computer reservation system which was developed to automate the way American Airlines booked reservations.

In the 1950s, American Airlines was facing a serious challenge in its ability to quickly handle airline reservations in an era that witnessed high growth in passenger volumes in the airline industry. Before the introduction of SABRE, the airline's system for booking flights was entirely manual, having developed from the techniques originally developed at its Little Rock, Arkansas reservations center in the 1920s. In this manual system, a team of eight operators would sort through a rotating file with cards for every flight. When a seat was booked, the operators would place a mark on the side of the card, and knew visually whether it was full. This part of the process was not all that slow, at least when there were not that many planes, but the entire end-to-end task of looking for a flight, reserving a seat and then writing up the ticket could take up to three hours in some cases, and 90 minutes on average. The system also had limited room to scale. It was limited to about eight operators because that was the maximum that could fit around the file, so in order to handle more queries the only solution was to add more layers of hierarchy to filter down requests into batches.

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Access flexible and diverse services, backed by the power of Sabre.

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Connect with a network of over 425,000 travel agents in 140+ countries.

Forget the Booze. The Mad Men’s Best Friend Was SABRE

IN THE SUMMER of 1953, an eager IBM salesman named Blair Smith boarded an American Airlines flight in Los Angeles bound for New York. He sat at the back of the plane, next to an unshaven man in rumpled clothes -- also named Smith -- and they got to talking.

The unshaven man turned out to be a "master conversationalist," Blair Smith remembered years later. "Within thirty minutes he knew my life story, and I only knew his name was Smith and his shirt was dirty and he needed a shave."

He also turned out to be the president of American Airlines, C.R. Smith, who was in the habit of flying from coast to coast without a shaving kit or a change of clothes. And by the time the 10-hour flight to New York was over, Blair Smith and C.R. Smith had started the ball rolling on what became a six-year research and development project codenamed the Semi-Automatic Business Environment Research, or SABER.

Later on, with the last two letters switched for copyright reasons, that system reinvented the way we travel. And it shook up computer science too. Today, SABRE is still the system that drives many of the airline reservations around the world, but few remember what an impact it had on the rise of the computer age. Here, we give you a brief history of this seminal system, complete with Brylcreem and pointy glasses and punchcards (see images above).

THE FIRST SYSTEM USED BY SABRE

Before SABRE, American Airlines reservationists kept track of travellers in much the same way that short-order cooks keep track of breakfast orders. They used lazy Susan like this one -- and doesn't that look fun.

It was a clumsy, ineffective system that was costing American money. Airplanes were flying with empty seats, and about 80 percent of them were because of bookkeeping errors in the lazy Susan.

SABRE's first system was comprised of two IBM 7090 mainframe computers, set up in Briarcliff Manor, New York. Born in 1961, it connected 1,500 terminals across the U.S. and Canada. The hardware alone cost about $30 million -- or $230 million in 2012 dollars -- making it the biggest order IBM had received, outside of government contracts.

An American Airlines operator sitting at a prototype of the SABRE ticket agent console poses next to 20,000 airplane tickets. That represented one day of American Airline ticket sales back in the early 1960s. Being able to have instant updates to its seat inventory and passenger information gave American a big competitive advantage. Soon other airlines would adopt SABRE too.

Passengers wait to check into an American Airlines flight in 1966. They had computerized airline reservations back then, but not roller bags.

Delta Air Lines President C.E. Woolman (left) and IBM's T.V. Learson get a SABRE demo.

Today, in the age of online reservations, SABRE can be used to book flights on hundreds of airlines. No longer part of American Airlines, its data centre has moved out of New York and is spread across three facilities. Though SABRE now uses thousands of Linux blade servers, the IBM mainframe is still at its core.

In fact, SABRE CIO Robert Wiseman says that while SABRE has been completely rewritten since the 1960s, the way a SABRE booking record is set up still owes a lot to Blair Smith and his team of developers. "There are certain basic concepts that we use that were based on the original system," he says.

Major airline delays worldwide after Sabre reservation system crashes.

A massive computer outage at Sabre airline reservation system overnight was blamed for worldwide flight delays. The system went down went down at 12:20 a.m. ET (05:20 GMT) on Tuesday morning. The company confirmed the outage, saying its technology team is working to resolve the situation. Some two hours after the outage was reported, Saber announced bringing the system back online.

Sabre is used by many airlines across the world. Among those affected by the outage are Alaska Airlines, American, Cathay Pacific, Frontier, Jet Blue, LAN, Quantas, United, Virgin America and Virgin Australia.

Virgin Australia, which implemented the Sabre system in January 2013, told Computerworld Australia that it switched to a manual check-in process for all domestic and international flights.“As a result, the check-in process may take longer than usual and there may be some delays to flights,” a spokesperson for the airline said. “We apologize for any inconvenience and we are working with Sabre to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

SABRE COMMERCE

When more than 425,000 agents across 6 continents search the world’s largest GDS, the Sabre system brings your brand, your inventory and your best offers front and center.

CORPORATE SOLUTIONS

Big challenges demand big solutions. When it comes to corporate travel, everything you need to comprehensively manage your program is here with Corporate Solutions. Corporate Solutions helps you maximize the value of your travel spend so you can turn business travel into business performance.

GOVERNMENT

The leading provider of government travel solutions in the U.S.

More than 70% of federal travel is processed using the Sabre® global distribution system (GDS). Sabre customizes solutions for government agencies and travel management companies including:

seamless access to proprietary internal government booking tools

full integration with military housing reservations systems

ticketing, both paper and electronic

access to exclusive content for air, hotel, rail, and more

support of the General Services Administration's eTravel initiative goals

Our signature government products, Government Sabre for travel management companies, and Get There Direct Government for government agencies, deliver access to government negotiated rates, policy compliance automated at the point of sale, and highly efficient, automated government travel booking.