Flights - IT reservation systems

Every day we find cheap tickets for our users on buruki.ru. But how is the market for airline tickets "under the hood"?

At the first stage of the chain are airlines - manufacturers of the product.

Airline ticketing is pure mathematics: the task of finding an extremum. The airline must sell seats in the aircraft with the maximum total amount, and the cost of each seat can be arbitrary - the passengers sitting nearby often pay a ticket for amounts that differ by several times.
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It is important to understand that the main business of the airline is the transportation of passengers, the maintenance and purchase of aircraft, the observance of the schedule and work on the maximum comfort of the client. Most companies sell tickets on their websites, but this is not the main sales channel. None of the carriers can provide full coverage of the route network - today you fly by Aeroflot, and tomorrow by Singapore Airlines. Therefore…

Since the 60s, airlines have become one of the locomotives of the IT industry, they needed a tool to sell tickets at geographically remote points, while providing an “exclusive lock” for each seat, so that standing passengers would not happen by chance. This problem is solved by the Global Distribution System (GDS).

One of the first GDSs appeared almost by accident when, in 1953, Blair Smith, IBM's sales manager, found himself at a nearby location with his namesake and American Airlines president Cyrus Smith. A month later, IBM came out with an official proposal for the development of GDS, which was launched in 1960 and still exists under the brand name SABER. The rest of the travel market players - hoteliers, organizers of cruises, car rental companies - caught up with the airlines. Now the main players - Amadeus, Saber, Apollo, Galileo, Worldspan - provide a full range of services anywhere in the world.

GDS allowed any travel agency to sell tickets for almost all flights in the world.

To date, one of the largest GDS is Amadeus - almost half a billion bookings for 500 million customers per year pass through them. Unfortunately, the long history of playing with the GDS is a cruel joke - if Google search takes no more than half a second, then the request for flights from St. Petersburg to Moscow can take up to 40 seconds. This is due to the huge array of data (the number of possible flight options between two points is billions!) And outdated technologies. For example, here is the terminal of the airline:



Until now, the rules for the application of each fare (the ability to hand over a ticket, fines for carrying a flight, etc.) are transmitted in a simple text format, in human language that is not strictly formalized and translated into machine-exact notation - that is also a task. Here is a live example with the rules for the delivery of the ticket:

FOR TRUOWM TYPE FARES
 
  CANCELLATIONS
 
    ANY TIME
      PER DIRECTION CHARGE EUR 50.00 FOR CANCEL/NO-SHOW/
        REFUND.
         NOTE -
          WHEN COMBINING ON A HALF ROUNDTRIP BASIS THE
          PENALTY CONDITIONS FOR EACH FARE COMPONENT APPLY.
          ------------------
          FULL REFUND PERMITTED BEFORE DEPARTURE IN CASE OF
          REJECTIONS OF VISA. EMBASSY STATEMENT REQUIRED. 

- — « ». American Airlines, , , p2p- AA Direct Connect http://directconnect.aa.com/, . , . 2009 .

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