Sabre

In the history of technology, Sabre is of legendary stature. Developed in the 1960s as a joint venture between American Airlines and IBM, it is generally accepted as the world’s first real-time e-commerce system.

Prior to Sabre, airline reservations were kept track of manually on lazy Susans and index cards. Sabre added the concept of real-time inventory, which enabled agents to view seat availability in real time. This infrastructure set the blueprint for all online transaction processing today, which has had impacts far beyond the travel sector.

Today, the company is working on three different verticals:

• Sabre Travel Network (GDS): It is the marketplace responsible for aggregating content on 400+ airlines and 175,000+ hotels and distributing it to travel agencies and corporations. It is especially abundant in the market of North America.
• Sabre Airline Solutions: They supply the internal software that the airlines need to fly. Their flagship product, SabreSonic, is a Passenger Service System (PSS) used by carriers, which include American Airlines and Etihad, for managing check-in, boarding, and weight & balance.
• Sabre Hospitality Solutions: With the acquisition of SynXis, Sabre offers the Central Reservation System (CRS) of thousands of hotels, along with the distribution and connectivity to the OTAs.

For decades, travel agents had dealt with Sabre through a command-line interface called the Blue Screen, where they typed in cryptic formats (such as W/UA123 to decode a fare).

While effective for power users, the learning curve was steep. The company has since migrated to Sabre Red 360, a graphical workspace that combines the speed of the old command lines with the visual richness of modern web apps (API-driven content, hotel images, and interactive maps) in a way that bridges the divide between the old, efficient, and modern ways of doing things.