SABRE: The first digitized database

James: Today, booking a cheap flight takes minutes. You open an app, do a quick search, pay, and off you go. Anyone with access to Wi-Fi and a credit card can be an international globetrotter.

James: Traveling by air hasn’t always been this simple or accessible. Can you imagine how long it would take to book a flight—or any type of service for that matter—if all information was stored on pieces of paper that had to be organized and accessed manually?

James: Today we’ll explore how the invention of the Sabre flight reservation system revolutionized both the computer database and the air travel industry.

James: Humans have always had a need to organize information. That’s why we’re doing a deep dive into the history and future of database technology and how people have leveraged data and collaboration to innovate over time.

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James: When you think of a database, I’m sure many of your minds go directly to the computer. But the definition of a database is much less specific. A database is a collection of information that’s organized so it can be easily managed and updated.

Chris Bogue: Before computer databases were invented, airlines used to have hundreds of operators on hand to manually process reservations. They sat around round tables with rotating Lazy Susans in the center of them.

James: These rotating shelves housed thousands of index cards—one for each flight. The operator would have to locate a flight’s index card, make a mark on the card to book the seat, and write out the flight ticket for the customer. This could take up to 90 minutes per reservation.

Chris Bogue: There was definitely a lot of room for human error, too. After a seat was sold for a flight, the passenger information was phoned into the flight’s originating city. People often misreported information, leading to inaccurate seat availability. One study showed that 80% of the time, errors were man-made, due to the airline’s manual reservation system.

Calvin: I’m Calvin Harper, I’m a writer, a former attorney, and I’ve written extensively on the history of computers.

James: Calvin, can you tell us more about some of the unique challenges paper databases posed for airlines?”

Calvin: Typically, you would call a travel agent. You would tell them when you wanted to travel, what dates, what times and destinations. The travel agent then would go ahead and call an airline, and the airline would take down your information by hand.

Calvin: There were problems, because when that ticket taker at the airline turned around to the Lazy Susan, there were five other airline employees using the same Lazy Susan, constantly checking flights. And occasionally cards got misplaced, or somebody would check the wrong seat or the wrong flight, which caused a great deal of confusion and a lot of frustration for passengers who had their reservations messed up. As a result, airlines were flying a lot without full seats and they were losing money with that. And passengers were generally frustrated.

James: The solution to this problem eventually came in the form of a network of computers that IBM first developed for the US Air Force. This network could send and receive information using teleprinters, which were similar to fax machines.

Calvin: Sabre was a complete revolution in the airline industry, and it really gave the industry a push and allowed large airlines to actually grow bigger…It reduced the number of errors, and it shortened the time from making a reservation to over 90 minutes, to just a couple minutes, two or three minutes.

Calvin: The good thing about Sabre was, American Airlines, they connected 1,500 consoles spread across Canada and the United States in 39 cities, to two mainframes back in New York, for IBM. And that allowed everything to just be smooth, just be efficient. And travel agents liked it, because then they also didn’t have to make as many calls. They took the information from a customer, they made the reservation, they called the customer back and said, "Hey, we’ve got it." As a result, I think it helped boom the industry on travel agency.

Chris Bogue: When you think about the cultural impact of Sabre, the technology opened the doors of air travel to the masses, making it much easier for people to search for and book flights It also made the lives of people working airlines much easier. And eventually, American Airlines extended Sabre to travel agents so they could book reservations directly.

James: In the 1990s, when the world wide web became a reality, Sabre took advantage of this new capability and created an online booking engine for consumers. Travelocity launched in the late nineties, paving the way for scores of online travel services that empower people to search, locate, and book flights, hotels—basically everything they need to travel.

Chris Bogue: I think it’s really interesting how Sabre, unlike some other now-obsolete database technologies, has managed to successfully evolve and adapt over the years.

Calvin: Well, within a few short years, all the airlines were using Sabre. Everybody liked it. Things were just better for everybody, especially the customer, which was the big thing that everybody wanted. There have been several upgrades over time, and over time, the bigger airlines have gone away from it. But Sabre, like I said, the original software is still as powerful as ever. It can process 30,000 transactions per second. And it continues to be used by travel- related entities, such as Travelocity, Expedia, Amtrak, the 911 system of New York State. So, it still has quite wide usage.

Chris Bogue: It’s also really interesting to consider how Sabre was basically the precursor for eCommerce. Any platform where you can search for a product or service, filter through options, and then buy that product or service evolved from Sabre technology created in the 1950s.

James: That’s one reason why, on this podcast, we like to point out how everything, from a technology perspective, is connected. Can you imagine what life would be like if Sabre had never been invented?

Calvin: I think for a while, without it, airlines would’ve been less profitable. They would’ve continued to have trouble remaining solvent, something we even see today, even with the system. There wouldn’t have been as many large airlines created. Most countries, in fact, they run national airlines as kind of a sense of pride, and yet, those national airlines all lose money. So, I think you would’ve seen more of that in the industry, of companies having difficulty maintaining operations.

Calvin: It certainly would’ve led to less international travel or would’ve certainly retarded national travel, the growth of it. There would’ve been fewer routes for everybody. Right now, you can fly into some smaller airports, but people would’ve consistently had to go into a hub and then find another means of transportation to a smaller town.

Calvin: Plus, it would’ve slowed down the spread of technology and wealth in the entire industry, as well as any airline, air travel-related industries, say hotels, online things that deal with it. There’s a whole market related to the airlines that would’ve been slowed down.

James: Well, I think we can all agree that the digitization of the database has made all of our lives much easier.

James: Calvin, thanks for joining us and helping us continue to tell the story of how the database has evolved to enrich people’s lives over the years.