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Table of Contents:

Computer systems:

Sabre System - historical links with Travelocity and American Airlines

Travelport was formed with the merger of Galileo and Worldspan.  Travelport is one of the main players in travel & accommodation providers. I'd say we're pretty big. We include Galileo, Gulliver's travel Associates and Orbitz Worldwide (where my business unit belongs). Our company recently bought out Worldspan as well.   We could also consider Expedia and Travelocity to be quite large and major players in travel & travel packagers.

Amadeus is the other major computer reservation system company.   

Major Global Distribution Systems arranged in descending market share order

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_reservations_system 

Today's Challenges (for computer reservation systems)

The big four GDSes are all facing challenges. Their system architectures are largely based on a mainframe Transaction Processing Facility framework which, while very reliable and capable of tremendous workloads, has relatively little central processing unit power, and can be expensive to maintain and enhance. The declining cost of modern server hardware and the relatively recent introduction of pricing, shopping, and booking software has allowed many airlines to shift significant buying volume to their own websites, thereby avoiding GDS distribution fees of US$4 or more per flight segment (on average a flight has 2.5 segments).

In recent years, all of the big four GDS companies have, to varying degrees, begun selectively migrating (or "offloading") processes from their legacy mainframe platforms to service oriented architectures (SOA). By utilizing high-performance, lower cost open systems platforms in a Service-oriented architecture approach, they further improve their capacity to cost effectively handle a fast-rising "look-to-book" ratio, i.e. the number of shopping transactions compared to actual purchases. The explosive growth of this ratio was driven initially by the creation and utilization of robotic software and, more recently, by the rapid growth of consumers' multi-site shopping behavior on the Internet.

Beginning in 2004, several companies – including Triton Distribution Systems, ITA Software, G2 Switchworks, Farelogix– claimed to be developing GDS alternatives. The new entrants tout lower fees and greater flexibility. The big four GDS companies cast doubt on their viability.

However, it is still very uncommon for a travel agency to operate without the use of at least one of the big four GDS systems. The GDS companies are playing catch up in the technology arena. All now have a browser based system; Sabre, Amadeus and Worldspan have full browser based solutions while Galileo still utilizes a VPN based system. Most, in one way or another, are aggregating webfares back into the GDS, and some airlines have agreed to post their webfares both to their own sites and on the GDS.

Many of these GDS's have now started to integrate forward into the business, reaching out to the customers with their own websites, such as Expedia (formerly owned by IAC, but now spun off into a separate company called Expedia Inc.), Travelocity (owned by Sabre), Orbitz (formerly owned by Cendant, but now called Travelport and has been recently sold to Blackstone) and many others. These new entrants to the market have further eroded revenues at the GDS.

Today, each system allows an operator to locate and reserve inventory (for instance, an airline seat on a particular route at a particular time), find and process fares/prices applicable to the inventory (Revenue management, Variable pricing and Marketing geography), generate tickets and travel documents, and generate reports on the transactions for accounting or marketing purposes.

U.S. Department of Transportation regulations governing CRS's were eliminated as of July 31, 2004. However, CRS's remain subject to government regulations in Canada and the European Union. Since all of the major CRS's operate globally, the most restrictive requirements — currently those of the EU Code of conduct for the use of computerised reservation systems — effectively govern their worldwide operations. The CRS/GDS companies have been lobbying Canada and the EU for worldwide deregulation of the industry.