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As a fun side thing, I am also a travel agent with access to some of these internal systems on the booking side. The technology is incredibly antiquated. Most o

As a fun side thing, I am also a travel agent with access to some of these internal systems on the booking side. The technology is incredibly antiquated. Most of the US runs on a system called SABRE, which is basically a MS-DOS system with a text command line interface and its own language. It's all ASCII text based (and all in uppercase). It's straight out of the 80s. Travel agents need to buy special "errors" insurance to cover any losses caused by fucking it up (a typo could accidentally cancel a ticket and cause the client thousands in losses rebooking it).

tintor 4y ago
What are the reasons preventing flight booking software modernization?
- nikanj 4y ago
  30 years of cumulative complexity in the existing stack, with endless edge-cases and special exceptions
  - sjm-lbm 4y ago
    .. and, as we're learning, extremely high penalties if one of those edge cases happens to cause a cascading failure.
- cmehdy 4y ago
  The typical answer for old behemoths: it was built because it was necessary to build it, and it won't change until a change is necessary too. Wanting that change is not enough, it has to become an almost mechanical constraint, and usually the constraint gets noticed when it far outweighs the costs (and not just a little). Or is a noticeable threat to the system's existence.
- mastax 4y ago
  Big software projects inevitably become expensive boondoggles that get everyone fired so nobody wants to do them until they're absolutely necessary.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- thebradbain 4y ago
  GDS — there’s really only 3 centralized stores of real-time flight/hotel/booking information in the entire world (Sabre/SABRE, Amadeus, and Travelport). Almost every American airline uses Sabre (American Airlines is an interesting case in that it does not technically in a legal sense, but actually it spun off and sold Sabre in 2000, so a lot of their core systems are forks of each other) Complexity — Fundamentally you’re looking at a logistics software, except unlike packages you’re dealing with people who aside from expected destinations have travel lengths and time-in-air calculated down to the minute. Also unlike a package, a surprise multi-day trip, unexpected multi-leg journey, one day delay is not something passengers (and crew members) will accept or be at all ok with. And if any one thing goes wrong there’s going to be cascading failures down the line— so much that it may break your company’s entire operating workflow (e.g. Southwest) entirely, and no software can overcome that kind of organizational gap. Airlines - There’s not many commercial passenger airlines left in the US, especially that fly nationwide. Good luck trying to convince one of these giant behemoths to move to a non-battle-tested system for core operations, especially when decades-old industry software and practices around that software exist. Entrenched - Sabre is entrenched in airlines around the world. They don’t just provide the booking services, they do the flight tracking, the ticket handling, the upgrading, the in-flight upgrades, missed connection handling, the flight scheduling algorithms, the pricing algorithms, the pilot and flight attendant time tracking, ground crew management, even the terminal software at each gate. To replace SABRE, you would physically need to rip out and then replace software around the world. And because agents don’t work from an office usually, but at the airport, you’re going to need to conduct trainings and provide support around the entire service area, which for the largest airlines is the entire world Scale — A lot of Sabre’s revenue comes from passengers boarded. It depends on the airline, but I believe the average is that each airline pays 10cents/customer boarded with their software (though with increases in passenger volume each year, it may be less now). Because Sabre is so prevalent, and so many flights use them, they can afford such a price. A company servicing just one regional passenger airline would absolutely not be able to compete on price, at least starting out Also— Sabre’s software itself is actually reliable! As a corporation it is slow clunky and bureaucratic, but the actual functionality it provides is stable, battle-tested, can handle any travel edge case you can think of, and fast and efficient for those who know how to use it, while also good enough at day to day operations that it doesn’t take too much time to train new agents on how to use it for routine tasks.
- supernova87a 4y ago
  Some brief answers / thoughts: 1) Replacing any software for an airline carries huge risk. They are barely operating ok with the software they have and holding it together with duct tape. Even something you might regard as ancillary, like a baggage handling software system, or flight catering software system, if it goes down, has the potential to disrupt thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of passengers for days. It is so significant an issue (to try to change some software, and just one out of many systems that have to talk to each other) that if an airline ever considers doing this, they may actually stop operations for some number of days while they do it rather than risk having operations go wrong. There are some rare examples of airlines doing this to try to change their systems. 2) Related to the above, airline management hates to be embarrassed by something that might work but has the potential to go badly wrong. So they are very conservative when it comes to replacing systems that are working, even if it's painful / much less functional than what they might achieve by a change. Combine these factors (and many others) and it means that sometimes starting a new airline is simpler than trying to fix an old one...
  - wwweston 4y ago
    > sometimes starting a new airline is simpler than trying to fix an old one... Now there's a truly total rewrite...
  - tintor 4y ago
    Can they gradually start moving flights to a new software?
- rsync 4y ago
  "What are the reasons preventing flight booking software modernization?" Let's ask the opposite question: Why do you feel that software necessarily needs to be modernized ? I'm not sure how well SABRE works but I do know how fast and efficient keystroking through a non-GUI interface can be and I don't know why expert mode interfaces should ever be replaced by unsophisticated mousey-mouse-mouse ones.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    In context, it seems like modernization simply means that the software knows whether a flight was canceled and therefore can automate the status updates for the airplane crew. Nothing to do directly with UX.
    - thebradbain 4y ago
      The existing flight booking software that they use (Sabre) can and does do that, but Southwest’s issue is likely their insistence on using a homegrown management system on top of that. Southwest only switched to Sabre in 2021, so it’s likely still being implemented, and their homegrown approach has likely evolved with them from their founding, so it’s not something the company itself is likely organizationally prepared for. At least, I feel confident in that analysis, since this exact same issue happened to Southwest in 2016, before they were using Sabre. Which would point to a chronic organizational failure https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/07/21/long-lines-for-southwest-airlines-passengers-at-area-airports/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/07/2...
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Sabre has a 10-year deal with GCP to do just that. It's going to take a lot more than 10 years to get the thing off System/360 running in a bunker under Omaha airport though. https://www.sabre.com/insights/releases/sabre-forges-10-year-partnership-with-google-to-build-the-future-of-travel/ https://www.sabre.com/insights/releases/sabre-forges-10-year...
- nunez 4y ago
  airline margins are paper thin these days. they weren't back when booking engines and reservation systems were being built. (SABRE was built by and spun off from American Airlines. Galileo was built by United before they merged with Continental.) this plus the absolutely insane business logic that goes into booking engines has made the effort extremely risky.
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
I remember using some version of SABRE through CompuServe back in the day. All command line stuff over a dial-up modem, but it was novel and cool to be able to book your own flights with it. It would be very annoying to still be stuck on that interface, though.
thebradbain 4y ago
They actually have a GUI interface over it now with the ability for power/legacy users to drop into the raw shell, if they wish. From feedback, many of the older agents actually prefer the command line, because it’s muscle memory and an experienced agent can perform routine tasks that would take multiple screens in the UI with one hand in the way we’re comfortable with our text editors. Granted, the rollout across airlines is probably glacial Source: I used to work there
- yardie 4y ago
  I don’t blame them. Modern UX has a huge problem with something as simple as date pickers. Preferring you scroll through 90+ items when a simple textbox would suffice.
rippercushions 4y ago
SABRE dates from 1960 and is by some reckonings the very first piece of commercial (non-military, non-academic) software in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_syst...
- fbdab103 4y ago
  That is a tremendously fun fact! The little background things that keep society running. May I never be cursed enough I would ever have to directly work with such a system.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  I wonder if it will ever go away.
  - noisy_boy 4y ago
    Even if this incident is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back, the migration itself would be a multi-year project.
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      I don't think SABRE has anything to do with Southwest's outage.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    It'll probably never go away, but just be layered over like civilizations. Eventually our software is probably going to get so complicated that we just build new software to interact with old software to avoid ever fully shutting it down. Like building a fresh highway on the oregon trail
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  And it's mainframe / COBOL, not DOS, which post-dates it by about a decade and a half. It's not even an ASCII text app, but an EBCDIC one. Or was after EBCDIC was defined as a standard, after SABRE itself launched.

tintor 4y ago

What are the reasons preventing flight booking software modernization?

nikanj 4y ago
30 years of cumulative complexity in the existing stack, with endless edge-cases and special exceptions
- sjm-lbm 4y ago
  .. and, as we're learning, extremely high penalties if one of those edge cases happens to cause a cascading failure.
cmehdy 4y ago
The typical answer for old behemoths: it was built because it was necessary to build it, and it won't change until a change is necessary too. Wanting that change is not enough, it has to become an almost mechanical constraint, and usually the constraint gets noticed when it far outweighs the costs (and not just a little). Or is a noticeable threat to the system's existence.
mastax 4y ago
Big software projects inevitably become expensive boondoggles that get everyone fired so nobody wants to do them until they're absolutely necessary.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thebradbain 4y ago
GDS — there’s really only 3 centralized stores of real-time flight/hotel/booking information in the entire world (Sabre/SABRE, Amadeus, and Travelport). Almost every American airline uses Sabre (American Airlines is an interesting case in that it does not technically in a legal sense, but actually it spun off and sold Sabre in 2000, so a lot of their core systems are forks of each other) Complexity — Fundamentally you’re looking at a logistics software, except unlike packages you’re dealing with people who aside from expected destinations have travel lengths and time-in-air calculated down to the minute. Also unlike a package, a surprise multi-day trip, unexpected multi-leg journey, one day delay is not something passengers (and crew members) will accept or be at all ok with. And if any one thing goes wrong there’s going to be cascading failures down the line— so much that it may break your company’s entire operating workflow (e.g. Southwest) entirely, and no software can overcome that kind of organizational gap. Airlines - There’s not many commercial passenger airlines left in the US, especially that fly nationwide. Good luck trying to convince one of these giant behemoths to move to a non-battle-tested system for core operations, especially when decades-old industry software and practices around that software exist. Entrenched - Sabre is entrenched in airlines around the world. They don’t just provide the booking services, they do the flight tracking, the ticket handling, the upgrading, the in-flight upgrades, missed connection handling, the flight scheduling algorithms, the pricing algorithms, the pilot and flight attendant time tracking, ground crew management, even the terminal software at each gate. To replace SABRE, you would physically need to rip out and then replace software around the world. And because agents don’t work from an office usually, but at the airport, you’re going to need to conduct trainings and provide support around the entire service area, which for the largest airlines is the entire world Scale — A lot of Sabre’s revenue comes from passengers boarded. It depends on the airline, but I believe the average is that each airline pays 10cents/customer boarded with their software (though with increases in passenger volume each year, it may be less now). Because Sabre is so prevalent, and so many flights use them, they can afford such a price. A company servicing just one regional passenger airline would absolutely not be able to compete on price, at least starting out Also— Sabre’s software itself is actually reliable! As a corporation it is slow clunky and bureaucratic, but the actual functionality it provides is stable, battle-tested, can handle any travel edge case you can think of, and fast and efficient for those who know how to use it, while also good enough at day to day operations that it doesn’t take too much time to train new agents on how to use it for routine tasks.
supernova87a 4y ago
Some brief answers / thoughts: 1) Replacing any software for an airline carries huge risk. They are barely operating ok with the software they have and holding it together with duct tape. Even something you might regard as ancillary, like a baggage handling software system, or flight catering software system, if it goes down, has the potential to disrupt thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of passengers for days. It is so significant an issue (to try to change some software, and just one out of many systems that have to talk to each other) that if an airline ever considers doing this, they may actually stop operations for some number of days while they do it rather than risk having operations go wrong. There are some rare examples of airlines doing this to try to change their systems. 2) Related to the above, airline management hates to be embarrassed by something that might work but has the potential to go badly wrong. So they are very conservative when it comes to replacing systems that are working, even if it's painful / much less functional than what they might achieve by a change. Combine these factors (and many others) and it means that sometimes starting a new airline is simpler than trying to fix an old one...
- wwweston 4y ago
  > sometimes starting a new airline is simpler than trying to fix an old one... Now there's a truly total rewrite...
- tintor 4y ago
  Can they gradually start moving flights to a new software?
rsync 4y ago
"What are the reasons preventing flight booking software modernization?" Let's ask the opposite question: Why do you feel that software necessarily needs to be modernized ? I'm not sure how well SABRE works but I do know how fast and efficient keystroking through a non-GUI interface can be and I don't know why expert mode interfaces should ever be replaced by unsophisticated mousey-mouse-mouse ones.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  In context, it seems like modernization simply means that the software knows whether a flight was canceled and therefore can automate the status updates for the airplane crew. Nothing to do directly with UX.
  - thebradbain 4y ago
    The existing flight booking software that they use (Sabre) can and does do that, but Southwest’s issue is likely their insistence on using a homegrown management system on top of that. Southwest only switched to Sabre in 2021, so it’s likely still being implemented, and their homegrown approach has likely evolved with them from their founding, so it’s not something the company itself is likely organizationally prepared for. At least, I feel confident in that analysis, since this exact same issue happened to Southwest in 2016, before they were using Sabre. Which would point to a chronic organizational failure https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/07/21/long-lines-for-southwest-airlines-passengers-at-area-airports/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/07/2...
rippercushions 4y ago
Sabre has a 10-year deal with GCP to do just that. It's going to take a lot more than 10 years to get the thing off System/360 running in a bunker under Omaha airport though. https://www.sabre.com/insights/releases/sabre-forges-10-year-partnership-with-google-to-build-the-future-of-travel/ https://www.sabre.com/insights/releases/sabre-forges-10-year...
nunez 4y ago
airline margins are paper thin these days. they weren't back when booking engines and reservation systems were being built. (SABRE was built by and spun off from American Airlines. Galileo was built by United before they merged with Continental.) this plus the absolutely insane business logic that goes into booking engines has made the effort extremely risky.

TigeriusKirk 4y ago

I remember using some version of SABRE through CompuServe back in the day. All command line stuff over a dial-up modem, but it was novel and cool to be able to book your own flights with it. It would be very annoying to still be stuck on that interface, though.

thebradbain 4y ago

They actually have a GUI interface over it now with the ability for power/legacy users to drop into the raw shell, if they wish. From feedback, many of the older agents actually prefer the command line, because it’s muscle memory and an experienced agent can perform routine tasks that would take multiple screens in the UI with one hand in the way we’re comfortable with our text editors. Granted, the rollout across airlines is probably glacial Source: I used to work there

yardie 4y ago
I don’t blame them. Modern UX has a huge problem with something as simple as date pickers. Preferring you scroll through 90+ items when a simple textbox would suffice.

rippercushions 4y ago

SABRE dates from 1960 and is by some reckonings the very first piece of commercial (non-military, non-academic) software in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_syst...

fbdab103 4y ago
That is a tremendously fun fact! The little background things that keep society running. May I never be cursed enough I would ever have to directly work with such a system.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
I wonder if it will ever go away.
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  Even if this incident is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back, the migration itself would be a multi-year project.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    I don't think SABRE has anything to do with Southwest's outage.
- xeromal 4y ago
  It'll probably never go away, but just be layered over like civilizations. Eventually our software is probably going to get so complicated that we just build new software to interact with old software to avoid ever fully shutting it down. Like building a fresh highway on the oregon trail
dredmorbius 4y ago
And it's mainframe / COBOL, not DOS, which post-dates it by about a decade and a half. It's not even an ASCII text app, but an EBCDIC one. Or was after EBCDIC was defined as a standard, after SABRE itself launched.