NEW DISTRIBUTION CAPABILITY AND COMPETITION 591 meant that airlines needed to look at more complex pricing models to fill the aeroplane. They started selling seats in the same travel class for different prices. In other words, airlines started selling products. The full fare product is not the booked-28-days-in-advance product. The airlines established their cooperative telecommunications provider, SITA, to facilitate bookings. It built a copper wire-based telex network. SITA let you make a complex international ticket purchase at a time when making an international phone call needed to be booked days in advance with the operator. When big aircraft arrived and yield management drove the capacity upwards, computers were introduced. Airline reservation systems became huge. American Airlines once had the world’s largest non-military computer to drive Sabre, its reservation system. Nonetheless, the bookings were still made by telex, on SITA’s network, linking as it did every airline’s ticket, airport and operations offices. But they were entirely in-house. American Airlines changed that by putting reservation terminals on travel agents’ desks. The Computer Reservation System (CRS) was born. The first CRSs given to agents listed their owners’ flights first. Gradually, that evolved: competition law caught up and demanded non-biased screen displays; agents increasingly demanded not only reservation systems, but also smart computers that managed their accounting, booked hotels, rented cars and reported sales to the airlines via the Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) established by one of the airlines’ trade associations, the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The cost of running such massive businesses became prohibitive. By the late 1990s, with the inevitable move from analogue to digital, the airlines sold out. CRSs became GDS, and airlines stepped back from direct control. The GDSs capitalised on the change in the balance of power and demanded guaranteed access to capacity. The fees went up too. Changes in airline booking behaviour had been matched, fortuitously, by advances in technology. First telex and analogue data communications and then large scale centralised computing facilitated the way airlines sold tickets. But the airlines and the GDSs were caught flat-footed by changes in consumer searching and booking behaviour brought about by the Internet. Even though bookings continue to use the telex standard – Type B – it now moved digitally over the cloud. Generally, low cost carriers do not sell via the GDS, and GDS struggled for some time to capture ancillary revenue requests as the legacy carriers unbundled their product. That is being addressed now. On the other hand, the GDSs could
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE4NzM5Nw==