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.
DEVELOPER
Integrate or innovate your own applications

Sabre Travel Network® provides developers the most
comprehensive end-to-end portfolio of services to build
and power travel applications.

Access flexible and diverse services, backed by the
power of Sabre.

Grow your business with industry-leading technology
and expertise.

Develop and test faster with Sabre® APIs (Sabre® Web
Services) and dynamic tools.

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 10hour 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:
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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.