4 ms·

What are the reasons preventing flight booking software modernization?

by tintor 4y ago

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.
- coldcode 4y ago
  SABRE is ancient technology, but very reliable and at the same time extremely inflexible. Last time I saw it upclose in the early 2000's much of the core was still coded in IBM assembler, although over the decades more pieces were slowly being modernized so I have no idea where it is now. Sabre is a horrifically un- imaginative company where projects are measured in years and not much every changes. I think though Southwest's issues are more on their side. Yeah building a new GDS today is an exercise in insanity, it's a huge complexity nightmare and switching probably impossible. I always wondered if AI could eventually improve things, but the existing GDSs are unlikely to care much to try. It's basically a (tri)monopoly you can never break.
- landemva 4y ago
  Great write-up. This applies to other industries such as dealerships with parts and service and various purchase plans. The software sucks for everyone except finance/accounting and that office is beside the Pres's office and therefore it won't change.
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.

What are the reasons preventing flight booking software modernization?

by 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.

coldcode 4y ago
SABRE is ancient technology, but very reliable and at the same time extremely inflexible. Last time I saw it upclose in the early 2000's much of the core was still coded in IBM assembler, although over the decades more pieces were slowly being modernized so I have no idea where it is now. Sabre is a horrifically un- imaginative company where projects are measured in years and not much every changes. I think though Southwest's issues are more on their side. Yeah building a new GDS today is an exercise in insanity, it's a huge complexity nightmare and switching probably impossible. I always wondered if AI could eventually improve things, but the existing GDSs are unlikely to care much to try. It's basically a (tri)monopoly you can never break.
landemva 4y ago
Great write-up. This applies to other industries such as dealerships with parts and service and various purchase plans. The software sucks for everyone except finance/accounting and that office is beside the Pres's office and therefore it won't change.

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.