Ticketing. Simplified.
Imagine that you’re a travel agent and you call an airline to book a flight for a customer. The call operator goes to a printed card on a rotating file – one per flight – and checks whether it has been marked as full. The entire process of looking for a seat and writing up a ticket takes around 2 hours.
That’s how the American Airlines reservation system worked in the 1950s. Fast-forward 50 years, and that same travel agent can book a seat online for their customer in a matter of seconds, as well as their insurance, car hire, hotel bookings and tours.
It’s all thanks to the development of Global Distribution Systems (GDS) such as Galileo and Sabre. Both launched in the early 1970s to cope with a dramatic increase in demand for air travel, and quickly expanded to include a wide range of travel information and associated services.
They have changed the way travel agents operate – and also made the rapid explosion of travel e-commerce, that ‘self-service‘ travel booking system, possible.
The very idea of writing out a paper airline ticket seems archaic. And yet in the education industry, we still rely on endless reams of paper to manage our student applications. So what can we learn from the success of Galileo and the rest?
Lesson 1. Efficiency.
First of all, they’ve made the entire process so much more efficient. Travel agents have more time to focus on the customer’s needs, and can respond quickly to requests for information. Airlines have the ability to make quick decisions about their services based on immediate access to information on their bookings.