Sabre (computer system)

Sabre Global Distribution System (GDS), owned by Sabre Holdings, is used by travel agents around the world with more than 400 airlines, 220,000 hotels, 42 car rental brands, 38 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, LastMinute, JetBlue, GetThere and Travelocity and past airlines such as Air Jamaica to search, price, book, and ticket travel services provided by airlines, hotels, car rental companies, rail providers and tour operators.

Sabre Holdings aggregates airlines, hotels, online and offline travel agents and travel buyers. The company is organized into three business units:

The company is headquartered in Southlake, Texas, and has 10,000 employees in 60 locations around the world with data-centers in global locations.

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.

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