Just received an e-mail with official notice of the demise of Easysabre on June 15th. Bummer!

Dear easySABRE Member,

Thank you for being a valued customer of easySABRE. This groundbreaking
product, launched over 13 years ago, has satisfied the travel needs of millions
of customers during its long run. Today, however, it is less than 1% the size of
Travelocity.com and thus on June 15, 1999 easySABRE will be phased out in
order to allow our development team to focus its efforts on updating and
enhancing Travelocity.com.

We know that you have chosen to use easySABRE rather than Travelocity.com,
so we have been working hard to add features to Travelocity.com so that it can
serve you as well as easySABRE has. Travelocity.com is the most powerful,
one-stop travel site on the net and now incorporates many of the services already
familiar to you as an easySABRE user.

As an easySABRE user, you are already a member of Travelocity.com. To log
in to Travelocity.com, simply go to http://www.travelocity.com and log in using
your current easySABRE login ID and password. Please feel free to email us at
[email protected] or call us at 1-888-709-5983 if you have any questions
about using Travelocity.com. You can also visit
http://www2.travelocity.com/easysabre/faq.html for answers to frequently asked
questions concerning the phase out of easySABRE.

If you are worried about speed, we have a new text based reservations feature.
Just click on Text Based Reservations under Travel Tools on the Travelocity.com
home page. The graphics are removed which means more speed! We're also
upgrading our servers and adding more internet capacity to speed things along.

Many of you have remarked about the lack of fare basis codes in Travelocity.com.
Over the years you've become as proficient as travel agents in looking at codes
and reading complex fare rules. We think we have removed the need for these
complex codes and rules with our new best fare finder feature. This product takes
the rules and converts them into an easy to read calendar so just a few clicks will
lead you to the lowest fare. You can access best fare finder via:

- Fare Watcher Email: With this free service, you can monitor up to 5 destinations
and Travelocity.com will email you each time the fare changes by $25. The best
fare finder feature will allow you to access the interactive calendar directly from
the email, highlighting the dates the fare is offered.
- "Book A Flight" reservations path: From the homepage, click on "Book A Flight"
and then select the best fare finder search option.
- Travelocity.com homepage: An animated directory on the homepage highlights
the lowest fares for the most popular cities booked.

We're all a little sad to see easySABRE fly off into the sunset, but we are excited
to have you join the over 6 million members of Travelocity.com, which provides
you with reservations capabilities for 95 percent of all airline seats sold, 40,000
hotels and more than 50 car rental companies. You can also access destination
and flight information, purchase tours and cruises, view maps, research bed and
breakfasts, look at seat maps, check the weather and be paged when your flight is
late. And be assured that the same folks who programmed easySABRE will be
working hard to continue to lead the travel industry in automation tools. We look
forward to serving your travel needs on Travelocity.com.

Sincerely,

The Travelocity.com Team - Your Online Travel Expert


[This message has been edited by Old Gold (edited 04-14-99).]

I replied with a letter of protest and then BEGGING for them not to do it.
<sniff>

I have sent two letters now.

Hey there are real people there. I got a reply (probably a standard one but it was prompt and different from the first one so I hope they will listen to some of our suggestions) to my request for fare codes in the new software:

"Hello and thank you for your E-mail.

We thank you for your comments regarding the sunset of the easySabre product. We will forward your comments and suggestions to our product development team for possible Travelocity.com enhancements.

Please let us know if you need further assistance.

Regards,
Gloria Christian
Travelocity.com"

Sounds like the decision to kill EaasySabre is final......

None of the airfare search engines are reliable. They all claim to find the best fare. Try searching for a non-Saturday night stay trip, EWR-ORD. For example, from EWR to ORD on 4/23 and return on the 24th. Remember that I want the lowest fare. The correct answer is $429 on NW with a connection in DTW. This can only be found on the NW search engine.Virtually all the search engines quote $ 1,037. The moral of the story is to check all possible sites if you really want the lowest available airfare.

Just got the same -- this is TERRIBLE, as all other sites are a total joke in comparison and are totally unreliable, especially on AA flights.

Every decision is REVERSIBLE, but we won't get it reversed by emailing some 20-year old guy sitting behind a computer.

Here's who we should be writing to:

Michael Durham
President & CEO
The SABRE Group Holdings
4255 Amon Carter Blvd.
Fort Worth, TX 76155

In addition, if you are Gold/Platinum/Executive Platinum, you should drop a line to American Airlines (they own 80+% of SABRE) highlighting, amongst other things, how influential easySABRE has been in making AA your preferred carrier. The address there is:

American Airlines
Executive Office
PO Box 619616, MD 2400
DFW Airport, TX 75261-9612

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take 5 minutes of your time to write one of the above. Some of the things that you might want to highlight some very important benefits MISSING from Travelocity:

* Ability to view choose flight classes, which enables us to reserve a fare other than the "lowest"
* Ability to pick connection point -- a necessity when doing travel to Europe or Asia/Pacific to avoid weird routing or to force it to choose an AA-based routing
* Ability to select "premium" seating on AA -- i.e. seats reserved for Gold/Platinum/Exec Platinum; Travelocity displays them as occupied even if they're not
* Ability to change seating on an existing reservation without having to call AA
* Ability to view schedules for any day -- not just TODAY -- so that we can plan
* Ability to see fares for specific departure and return date -- not just all fares for a specific departure date
* Speed, speed, and speed.

At least, a victory would be to have those issues fixed in Travelocity *before* they kill easySABRE!

Just got an email from Travelocity advising me they have effectively retired my easySABRE ID and are now forcing me to use my email address. I used to love logging in with my easySABRE ID - It was a small link to the golden years!




* Emphasis mine.

Wow, a 15-year thread resurrection. I think that may be a record.

15 years to be able to keep using your log-on credentials for a closed-down service is perhaps a record as well?

I was quite shocked to learn that this � which sounds like my dream on-lone travel agent � existed way back in the early dot-com era. Sometimes the passage of time doesn't imply progress.

Bumping very old threads is not a good thing.
Obscure 2k
TravelBuzz Moderator