It is not clear whether airlines hold travellers hostage to spelling sorrows and miseries, or the airlines are being held hostage to the spelling sorrows and mi

It is not clear whether airlines hold travellers hostage to spelling sorrows and miseries, or the airlines are being held hostage to the spelling sorrows and miseries by travel reservation systems. The airlines get their data feeds from the travel reservation systems – the ones we (or the travel agent) interface with via the airline website or a dedicated web portal. There are two major global ones, Amadeus and SABRE (there are other ones as well). I do not know how any of them interconnect, though. There have been numerous attempts to modernise both (including rewrites from scratch), and all the attempts have failed so far due to the complexity of the logic: calculating the most optimal travel time for connecting flights in a multi-leg trip is, like, very hard, apparently + applying a correct airfare prices based on the selected itinerary and a myriad of other variables. Subsequently, there has been the decades' worth of growth of the said logic – there was an epic story on here some years back about one such endeavour (I think it was an Amadeus rewrite). From what I remember, the character encoding was not even considered to be a problem in that endeavour – as in «acknowledged, is trivial to solve, now let's move on onto the actual problems».