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ABSTRACT
Before global distribution systems such as Amadeus appeared, a revolutionary idea that triggered a chain reaction, changing the way people did business had emerged.
Throughout history a lot of ideas and inventions have come out, like the wheel, the steam engine, the printing press, the computer, the online environment etc. Such a revolutionary time was when airlines started to develop computerized systems to conduct their research.
Key words: global distribution systems, computerized reservation systems, Amadeus, reservation system
1. INTRODUCTION
Before the development of computerized systems, to make a reservation for a ticket with the airline companies was a complex process. Airlines published their schedules and ticket prices periodically, and these were then distributed to travel agents.
If a client wished to book a flight from, let us say, Paris to Berlin, the travel agent had to identify the airline that had any flights on the desired route and to examine each schedule to see if they have a flight that matches the customer's preferences. This search process through multiple flight timetables was simplified through the publication of the Official Airline Guide (OAG), which gathered prices and dates from multiple airlines in one publication.
Once the travel agent identified a suitable flight, (s)he had to contact the airline reservation department to check if there were any available seats at convenient prices. Both the flight details and the advantageous price were then presented to the client for approval, after which the travel agent had to contact the reservation department once more to reconfirm the details and make the reservation.
Clearly these three traditional steps "search, call, reserve" were unsatisfactory for all the parties involved. The travel agent had to keep the schedule hours and (s)he had big telecommunication costs to call the airlines to check the availability and the cost of tickets and then to make the reservations.
Moreover, the amount of time that was necessary to deal with all the clients' requests, to find the relevant information and then to book the flight made the daily operations of travel agents very costly, from the point of view of labor costs. Research has shown that travel agents spent up to 80% of their time doing things that prepared them for making reservations, and only...