Sabre (travel reservation system)

Sabre is a computer reservations system used by airlines, railways, hotels, and other travel companies.

The system was developed in order to help American Airlines, who were facing a serious problem by the 1950s. Their system for booking flights was entirely manual, having developed from the techniques originally developed at their Little Rock, Arkansas reservations center in the 1920s. Their system used a rotating file with cards for every flight, which a team of eight operators would sort through. If a seat was booked they would place a mark on the side of the card, and knew visually whether or not it was full. This part of the process was not all that slow, at least when there weren't 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 for growth. 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.

AA had already attacked the problem to some degree, and was in the process of introducing their new Magnetronic Reservisor in 1952 to replace the card files. This consisted of a single magnetic drum, each memory location holding the number of seats left on a particular flight. Using this system a large number of operators could look up information at the same time so the ticket agents could be told over the phone whether or not a seat was available. On the downside a staff member was still needed at each end of the phone line, and actually handling the ticket still took considerable effort and filing. Something much more highly automated was needed if AA was going to enter the jet age, booking many times more seats.

It was during the testing phase of the Reservisor that a high-ranking IBM salesman, Blair Smith, was flying on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles back to IBM in New York in 1953. He found himself sitting next to AA president C. R. Smith. After the convenient "our names..." introduced the two, they got to talking about their jobs.

Just prior to this chance meeting, IBM had been working with the US Air Force on their SAGE project. SAGE used a series of large computers to coordinate the message flow from radar sites to interceptors, dramatically reducing the time needed to direct an attack on an incoming bomber. The system used teletype machines located all around the world to feed information into the system, which then send orders back out to teletypes located at the fighter bases. It was one of the first online systems.

It was not lost on either that the basic idea of the SAGE system was perfectly suited to AA's booking needs. Teletypes would be placed at AA's ticketing offices to send in requests and receive responses directly, without the need for anyone on the other end of the phone. The number of available seats on the aircraft could be tracked automatically, and if a seat was available the ticket agent could be notified instantly. Booking simply took one more command, updating the availabilty and even printing out the ticket for them.

Only 30 days later IBM sent a research proposal to AA, suggesting that they really study the problem and see if an "electronic brain" could actually help. They set up a team consisting of IBM engineers and a large number of AA's staff, taken from booking, reservations and ticket sales, calling the effort the Semi-Automatic Business Environment Research, or SABER.

A formal development arrangement was signed in 1957, and the first experimental system went online in 1960, based on two IBM 7090 mainframes in a new data center located in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The system was a success, luckily because the whole program to this point had cost the astonishing sum of $40 million to develop and install it, about $350 million in 2000 dollars. The system took over all booking functions in 1964, at which point the name had changed to the more familiar SABRE. In 1972 the system was moved to IBM S/360 systems in a new underground location in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Originally used only by AA, the system was expanded to travel agents in 1976. It is currently used by a large number of companies, including Eurostar, SNCF, and US Airways. Today the system connects more than 30,000 travel agents and 3 million consumers with more than 400 airlines, 50 car-rental companies, 35,000 hotels and dozens of railways, tour companies, ferries and cruise lines.

With SABRE up and running, IBM offered its expertise to other airlines, and soon developed Deltamatic for Delta Air Lines on the IBM 7094, and Panamac for Pan-American Airlines using an IBM 7080. In 1968 they generalized their work into the PARS system , which ran on any member of the IBM S/360 family and thus could support any sized airline. This later evolved into ACP, the Airline Control Program.

American spun off Sabre in the 1990s; the system is now owned by an independent operator, Sabre Holdings. The Travelocity website is owned by this company and serves as a consumer interface to the system.

Notes

• The meeting of the Smiths on the AA flight may not have actually happened. Almost all histories mention it as fact though.
• Different sources disagree on many of the dates. Some place the project starting in 1953, some 1957, some place the original system in Manhattan, others Briarcliff. For instance this story from CNN places the start date in 1960 and the cost at $150 million.
• Actually, the name SABRE wasn't changed just because it's more familiar. It's also an acronym for Semi-Automated Booking and Reservation Environment.

See also

• ERMA - another pioneering early system. ERMA, SAGE and SABRE helped legitimize computers in business.

External links

• Sabre Holdings