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For the first time, the majority of the airline’s content and booking capabilities are available in global distribution systems (GDS) at an industry-standard level of participation, instead of at a basic booking level.

In August 2019, the airline announced that after nearly 50 years in operation, it would significantly expand the amount of content it offers in the GDS through agreements with Travelport and Amadeus

Nearly every other major U.S. airline is in all three of the main GDS providers: Amadeus, Travelport, and Sabre, at an industry-standard level of participation. Prior to this May’s launch, Southwest only offered limited participation in Sabre and Apollo

A Market of 3 Companies Reinventing their Relevance

The reports of the death of global distribution systems (GDS) have been greatly exaggerated. Several industry analysts believed that GDS would not last long and that airlines would eventually shy away from them

Three primary companies dominate the global distribution systems (GDS) market: Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport. Each of the companies has extended its market reachthrough affiliates or subsidiary companies that offer GDS.

In his experience, Pestronk said, Amadeus offers the best deals, followed by Travelport, followed by Sabre, because of the latter two GDSs' size and presence in the U.S. market.

It would be wise for agencies to shop around and get competing offers while GDS offers are so strong, Pestronk said, as it's a phenomenon that likely won't last forever.

Penalties for using another GDS or aggregator are also getting lower today.

GDS, OTA and Meta: What’s the difference?

how can they help your hotel gain more online visibility and sell more rooms?

Hotels usually sell their rooms for 30% cheaper on GDS

The question of whether GDSs remains a relevant middleman in today’s evolving travel landscape continues to be a hot topic of discussion at ASEAN Tourism Conference during ATF last week, as industry players bring different sides of the argument to the table.

multi-source" hotel distribution initiative

giving agents easy access to hotels from different sources from a single screen

similar to Google Hotel Finder allows agents to click on a hotel listing and view its multiple offers from different sources.

Global distribution systems (GDSs) are computerized networks/platforms that centralize services and provide travel-related transactions. They cover everything from airline tickets, to car rentals, to hotel rooms, and more. Global distribution systems were originally set up for use by the airlines but were later extended to travel agents. Today, the systems allow users to purchase tickets from multiple different providers or airlines. Global distribution systems are also the back end of most Internet-based travel services.

To see how global distribution systems work, take a closer look at one of the largest—Amadeus. Amadeus was created in 1987 as a joint venture between Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, and SAS and has grown considerably over the past twenty-five years.

There's no doubt that global distribution systems will play an important part in the travel landscape for many years to come, but their traditional role is changing and being challenged by all the changes taking place in the travel industry. Two important considerations impacting the role of global distribution systems are the growth of online travel websites that offer price comparisons and the increased push from airlines and other travel service providers to encourage consumers to make bookings directly via their websites.

Nowadays, more travel is sold over the Internet than any other consumer product. The Internet is a perfect medium for selling travel as it brings a vast network of suppliers and a widely dispersed customer pool together into a centralized market place. Nearly 37 million of America's more than 162-million active Internet users have already purchased travel online. Online travel bookings exceeded $23 billion in 2001, and are expected to reach $63 billion by 2005.

These systems have become electronic supermarkets linking buyers to sellers and allowing reservations to be made quickly and easily.

the best known global CRSs are AMADEUS, GALILEO, SABRE, and WORLDSPAN with AMADEUS being the only one which is largely owned by European airlines. Together with GALILEO, it is the leading system in the European market. GALILEO, however, also has a strong position in the US market after it merged with an American system. SABRE and WORLDSPAN have been developed in the US. So far, SABRE is the only CRS which is wholly owned by one single airline.

CRSs are systems for purely (information transfer) logistical functions

he network of the global CRS AMADEUS has additional 14 network nodes distribers who thus have the latest information about availability at any point in time and can use it as a basis for a new offer. In addition, the system can also store customer related information such as e.g. all services provided to a certain customer, type of payment, service information etc. ♦ Fare Quote & Ticketing: Just like the product presentation, the fare quote, ticketing and voucher generating process depend on the type and the complexity of the services offered. For flights, multiple fares are being offered which differ according to the reservation category, the date of the journey, the day when the reservation was made, the route and the length of the stay. That means that practically each fare needs to be calculated individually. In addition, fare quotes can change daily. The prices of other service providers, however, are relatively fixed so that in most cases, they stay an unchanged part of the offer. For the ticketing, travel agencies receive a fixed number of ticket forms which may only be used after confirmation has been availability of particular reservation categories and possibly the fare. It may, however, be difficult to describe the products of other service providers appropriately with only a limited amount of information. Hotels, for example, have so far only been able to provide information about the price, the size of the bed and its approximate location which alone is not a meaningful description for potential customers. For this reason, it is intended to link the particular offers to visual multimedia technology to be able to provide more detailed information to the customer. ♦ Reservation: The core function of reservation systems and the main reason for developing them is the reservation of offered services in the travel industry. To this end, a so called Passenger Name Record (PNR) or Guest Name Record (GNR) is created for each passenger or each group of passengers. These records contain all services-related customer information. At the same time, this information is transferred to the internal inventory system of all service providFigure 2 Principel structure of CRSs N N P pr S Fare Quote and T Hotel- or Car-Systems Travel Agencies Tourism Tourism Tourism Tourism Stickynote

While the major GDSs -- Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport -- initially resisted NDC, all three eventually reversed course and last year announced that they would develop and test NDC-enabled solutions.

"It is clear that the GDSs are now en masse embracing NDC and trying to at least equalize the airline dot-com content and experience and trying to bring that to the indirect channel,"

Sabre earlier this month released its first set of NDC application programming interfaces (APIs) with United Airlines. That gave some agency customers the ability to make NDC bookings, which Kathy Morgan, vice president of NDC at Sabre, called "huge."

At first, GDS’ were only meant for the air travel reservations but as years have passed, GDS systems became more and more evolved. As a direct consequence to this fact, GDS’ were also implemented for hospitality industry use.

In the distribution landscape, Global Distribution Systems (GDS) are just one of the many players involved in selling your rooms to a world of travelers.

What is a global distribution system (GDS)? In simple terms, a GDS acts as a middle-man that connects your small hotel to a network of travel agency professions.

You connect to the GDS, giving you access to all of the travel agents your GDS is connected with. Those travel agents then sell your rooms to their customers (a mix of corporates and leisure travelers), and any bookings made are automatic.

The Global Distribution Systems (GDS) have long been the main tool for travel agents bookings in the world.

Alice, a startup that sells operations software to hotels, has raised $26 million in a Series B funding round led by online travel giant Expedia.

Expedia’s interest in Alice suggests that the online travel company is curious about possibly providing more back-end software services for the hotels that use it to market and distribute their inventory globally.

The company “is now at a completely different level,” when it comes to putting into place a set of tools that are broad and comprehensive and that are responsive to what hotels have said their needs are, he claimed.

An investigation is underway into a booking software vulnerability that exposed airline passenger name records, which is a bundle of personal and travel data that gets collected whenever someone books a flight

Airlines typically issue a six-digit alphanumeric booking reference code whenever someone books their ticket. When combined with a passenger's last name, this code, which is sometimes referred to as a PNR locator, is enough to access the individual's travel record via the airline's website.

El Al sends customers a link to a web page to check their PNR. But Rotem discovered that he could insert a random booking reference number into the link. After inputting the number, Rotem then obtained a random PNR, which exposed a passenger's data.