The history and future of the GDS | SilverRail Technologies - 3 views
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In the emerging era of the GDSs (late '70s to early '80s), they served an enormously useful function of allowing travel agents to connect to multiple travel providers (by this time starting to include hotels and rental cars) in a single system, minimizing the need for development to multiple systems for the sellers. It also therefore provided a great service to the suppliers: because the GDSs were connected to a huge number of travel sellers, the suppliers could reach a broader audience than they could with direct connections themselves.
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the standards that have developed in the air market (ticketing standards, timetable standards, airport / station codes, standards on fares) do not exist in rail at all.
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Not only that, but there is the added complexity of traveling by rail, in that there are 1000x more train stations in the world than there are airports, which therefore creates the exponentially more complex combination of routes.
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Having a content aggregation would be a great development in any industry specially in Travel business. At first place GDS was ment to be designed for airlines but as the time passed other sections of travel business got involved and took their share in this powerful content aggregation. Now one of the most powerful sectors of GDS is Hotel industry and reservations of hotel rooms which are made through this computerized system. However, this improved system of GDS could not be much of success in rail industry. Because the railing system is much more sophisticated than air transportation system. There are numerous rail stations existing out there which would be hardly controllable and arrangeable to be collected under a single computerized system. However, if every and each of the major owners of GDS consider the whole chain and don't look for their very own profit this system would not only work out but also improves and reaches higher standards.