
Technology That Changed Air Travel - refrigerator
https://tryretool.com/blog/air-travel-software/
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refrigerator
Hi! I'm the author of this blog post. This was fun to write: I've taken a
bunch of flights in my lifetime, and was always curious what travel agents are
doing when they book a flight, or what check-in agents are doing when they
"can't find the ticket".

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kmarc
Thanks for the article, interesting read!

In 2016, AUS airport a colleague and I at the gate offered our seats for a
later flight and ~$500 cash. The helpful attendant starts "searching" for a
possible double-ticket in their system, to my biggest surprise, not really
using the mouse but just typing, like "hackers" in movies.

At one point she tells us disappointed she couldn't find anything, and turns
the monitor to show it to us. Both working in IT, we look at the screen
totally astonished: 80x25, white-on-blue, looks like a hex editor (pairs of
letters clustered), and the lady continues to type in commands, with the speed
of how people play candy crush nowadays, not how a flight attendant would use
a CLI :-D

Since then I know what GDS is and how it looks like

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bronco21016
It kills me now going to a gate and the agent is using a GUI. It’s so insanely
slow compared to a good, experienced, gate agent using the CLI.

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nikanj
Deskilling has been brutal in the airline industry. Replacing that good,
experienced, union-paid gate agent with a outsourcing-thrice-removed permatemp
worker has brought costs down considerably. Making the systems easier to use
has been crucial in enabling that.

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cyberferret
Back in the early 90's, my best friend and I started a software consulting and
development company called 'Sabre Systems' here in Australia.

We started getting calls at least 2 to 3 times a week from travel agents all
over the world asking for support and information. It took us several weeks to
cotton on that there was a worldwide booking system called SABRE, and that
these agents were looking up the name on very early versions of Google or
Yahoo search engines (or even just Yellow Pages) and finding our company!

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berkut
I've been in a different industry for 8 years now, but previously I was in the
travel / airline industry working on backend booking systems: it was
surprising at the time to me how much stuff was still done using things like
VT320 terminals.

Interestingly back in ~2008, Amadeus did actually introduce some new XML web
APIs for doing things, but they were so badly designed and slow that we ended
up still using console terminal text entering / scraping as it was much faster
for performing the same tasks (searching for flights, querying them and
booking them).

And this terminal text entering / scraping code was pretty complicated as it
had to cope with pagination on the terminals, scrolling text fields on the
terminals, positioning, etc. Obviously only supported ASCII as well.

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merty
Thanks, I enjoyed the read the first time I came across.

I really don't want to come across as an annoying person but please do not
submit the same content marketing articles over and over again. This is the
5th time you're submitting this.

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Animats
When was this written? It talks about XML as a new technology.

~~~
refrigerator
Ah sorry for the confusion — NDC is the new technology
([https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/airline-
distribution/ndc/Pages...](https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/airline-
distribution/ndc/Pages/default.aspx)), but it's built on XML :)

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abhinai
Can't help but wonder why they didn't pick JSON. :)

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krick
I'd say the article isn't entirely accurate. First off, it's not like they all
still use EDIFACT today, XML APIs are there for years for all major GDS
(Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport products), and there are multiple APIs with
different capabilities. And some APIs are actually available via JSON
transport. But that doesn't matter that much, really, there are countless
reasons why pretty much all of these APIs are fucked up, XML/SOAP with broken
WSDLs as a transport is really more like a minor inconvenience compared to
everything else that bothers me when thinking about their APIs.

