Concept
Sabre Global Distribution System, owned by Sabre Corporation, is a travel reservation system used by travel agents and companies to search, price, book, and ticket travel services provided by airlines, hotels, car rental companies, rail providers and tour operators. Originally developed by American Airlines under CEO C.R. Smith with the assistance of IBM in 1960, the booking service became available for use by external travel agents in 1976 and became independent of the airline in March 2000. The system's parent company is organized into three business units: Sabre Travel Network: global distribution system Sabre Airline Solutions: airline technology Sabre Hospitality Solutions: hotel technology solutions Sabre is headquartered in Southlake, Texas, and has employees in various locations around the world. The name of the travel reservation system is an abbreviation for "Semi-automated Business Research Environment", and was originally styled in all-capital letters as SABRE. It 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.