ABSTRACT

Investment in Information Technology (IT) within the airline industry did not really begin in earnest until the late 1950s. In the early days the reservation systems were at the forefront of technology within the aviation industry. American Airlines, an early pioneer in the use of commercial computer technology, had developed a semi-automated customer reservation system called Reservisor by 1960. The system’s original core purpose was to minimize the clerical costs of managing and booking inventory which at that time was characterized by a twohour process to complete a booking and reservation that could only be made 30 days in advance. Recognizing that semi-automatic systems would not be capable of handling the rapidly increasing demand for air travel, American Airlines had already begun working with IBM to develop the first automated, online, real-time Computerized Reservation System (CRS) called the Semi-Automated Business Research Environment (SABRE). The joint project would use interactive, realtime computing technology developed for a US government air defence project referred to as Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (Eklund, 1994). Most of the computing systems that existed in the 1960s were batch processing systems, but SABRE was an early example of a transaction processing system. It modified the content of the large databases containing flight and passenger information as a direct result of information entered directly from data terminals. Information that was available in a single repository offered an invaluable source of data to assist in other critical functions associated with the planning of capacity and the organization and planning of logistics and supply chain elements such as baggage handling, food and fuel planning. Fortune Magazine (1985) reported that American Airlines invested $350 million into SABRE in the mid 1960s, which was enough to purchase seven DC-10 jets.1 Within five years 8,000 travel agents across the US had leased Sabre terminals. Meanwhile United Airlines, the largest US airline,

captured 6,000 travel agents with its competing Apollo terminals. Three other airlines TWA, Eastern and Delta followed with weak, belated systems of their own. These reservation systems had revolutionized the travel agency business.