Delta to bypass Sabre with new reservation system
 

The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that Delta is building a new computer system that will "let travel agents book flights directly with the carrier, helping trim the $300 million spent annually on fare distributors such as Sabre Holdings Corp."

Here's the link:
AJC.com: Fare system deal to trim expenses for Delta - Airline teams with Farelogix on interactive 
system for travel agents

The article also says that Farelogix Inc. was hired on April 12 to do this work and that the new system will go live in the 4th quarter.

#WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong

Oh....my....I can hardly wait to hear the comments on this one....:rolleyes:

Without knowing much of the specifics, I'm going to choose to be optimistic.

Airline reservation systems are phenomenally complex. On the other hand, they are remarkably similar to the systems originally developed decades ago and haven't really had to incorporate any major changes since the advent of the Internet.

By starting over perhaps they can rid themselves of a lot of the constraints that is preventing them from addressing a lot of the known deficiencies with their system.

Is the assumption here that Delta will kill access to DL tickets from Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak, etc.?

Good for DL. I applauded AA trying to cut out the waste of third parties, and I hope DL does it even better.

Yeah, so everybody gets to use the extremely user friendly and accurate DL booking engine!

I agree, hats off to AA for trying, but it ended up costing them business in the long run and now they are going to court and suing them...

http://www.consumertraveler.com/toda...xcluding-them/

They trust DL IT to accomplish this? I'm almost falling out of my chair in laughter.

I don't think that DL IT is incompetent, per se, they merely focus resources on projects that have little or no use to me.

It's not just AA, they just took the lead. There is going to be a lot of blowback from the airlines coming. US just sued Sabre today.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000..._leftHeadlines

.....

Worldspan is their "native" system, in which their internal operations are performed. But they also use Sabre, Galileo and others to distribute product.

First they disintermediated the travel agents - now they seek to disintermediate their distributors.

$300 million? Hopefully use some of that to fix something that still hasn't been fixed since the beginning of time. Yes, we all know what that is.

Well you know that isn't going to happen.