562 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM reservations. Such a practice was, in fact, a very laborious work. However, the emergence of computing technologies offered another solution. The Computerized Reservation System (CRS) first appeared in the late 1950s as an internal system of airline companies (“operational system”) thanks to the development of computing technologies. This was the case, for instance, with American Airlines, which developed the CRS “Sabre”. Since that moment, it has become one of the most important Global Distribution System (GDS) in the world. At that time, CRSs facilitated the search and reservation of flights and soon was considered to provide a competitive advantage for airlines. Indeed, airlines such as American Airlines, which made a huge investment in developing their own CRSs (named “parent carrier”), gradually opened the access to their internal system to other companies devoid of their own system (named “participating carrier”), as well as to intermediaries such as travel agents. Doing so, they shared access to their own systems, marking a significant change in air tickets distribution. CRSs permitted to stock data relating to schedules, prices and seat availabilities of all airlines hosted by the CRS and to communicate them upon the request of agents for a particular travel, enabling an immediate response containing all the available and relevant results2. Despite their real usefulness, the evolution of the first CRSs, as operated in the USA, nevertheless led to anticompetitive practices (unfair presentation of results, entry barriers to participating airlines, etc.). New competition rules (non-discrimination rule, neutrality rule, etc.) were then adopted in the USA in the early eighties to cope with criticism and to restore fair competition among airlines for tickets distribution. In Europe, in light of the American experience, it was decided to adopt codes of conduct to avoid anticompetitive practices3. This finally led to the appearance of GDS. In the nineties, CRSs became autonomous, as most airlines (parent carriers) waived their control over CRS (known as “dehosting”)4. Consequently, CRS evolved to GDS in a more global dimension as they were also expanded to other services (hotel, car rentals, etc.)5. The most well-known GDSs are Sabre, Amadeus andTravelport. GDS benefitted 2 Saglietto Laurence, L’émergence des systèmes informatisés de réservation au cœur du réseau des transports aériens. Revue d’économie industrielle, vol. 98, 1st trim. 2002, pp.75-93. 3 Op. Cit. note 2. 4 Europarl. Les droits des passagers dans le transport aérien, 1999. Document de travail TRAN 105, chapter 3. 5 Laurence Saglietto, Transport aérien et montée en puissance des systèmes informatisés de réservation. Gérer et Comprendre, March 2004, pp.64-81.
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