Sabre, Compaq Join Forces To Transform The GDS

Sabre and Compaq Computer Corp. last week announced plans to migrate Sabre's mainframe applications to Compaq's NonStop Himalaya server and database environment, creating a next-generation travel tech platform they said will make "travel shopping, planning and managing easier and faster." Sabre said the new "open system" will reduce its total cost of ownership by 40 percent, improve development productivity by 100 percent and reduce cycle time to update fare rules by 75 percent.

By early 2002, Sabre will offer simultaneous searching for domestic availability and price, and its fare download from the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. significantly will be faster. Later stages will address international faring and other services. Travel tech pundit Richard Eastman of The Eastman Group agreed with a Sabre spokeswoman that the $100 million agreement is "a huge deal."

"Properly implemented, this will change the way the total travel product is distributed, including the roles of travel agents and corporate travel departments," Eastman said. He related Sabre's plans to incorporate the latest in shopping algorithms to what Orbitz does with ITA Software. "Today, if you want to compare price and availability in the airline host systems, you must first get availability and then ask the price," he said. "In the first phase of the Sabre solution, that will be integrated and you'll get back only those fares that meet your qualifications. Orbitz gets a copy of availability requests from Worldspan and then melds it together in the background."