Not
many of us, even frequent travelers, know much about what happens when we book
an airline ticket. Irrespective of the airline or destinations you book a
ticket for, what your online portal or travel agent is using in the background
is what is commonly known as a Global Distribution System.
According
to Wikipedia, “A Global Distribution System (or GDS) is a network operated by a
company that enables automated transactions between travel service providers
(mainly airlines, hotels and car rental companies) and travel agencies. Travel
agencies traditionally relied on GDS for services, products & rates in
order to provision travel-related services to the end consumers. A GDS can link
services, rates and bookings consolidating products and services across all
three travel sectors: i.e., airline reservations, hotel reservations, car
rentals.
GDS
is different from a computer reservations system, which is a reservation system
used by the service providers (also known as vendors). Primary customers of GDS
are travel agents (both online and office-based) to make reservation on various
reservation systems run by the vendors. GDS holds no inventory; the inventory
is held on the vendor's reservation system itself. A GDS system will have
real-time link to the vendor's database. For example, when a travel agency
requests a reservation on the service of a particular airline company, the GDS
system routes the request to the appropriate airline's computer reservations
system. This enables a travel agent with a connection to a single GDS to choose
and book various flights, hotels, activities and associated services on all the
vendors operating in the same route who are part of that GDS network.”
Considering
that there are so many airlines, hotels and car rental companies, it might come
as a surprise that there are merely a handful of GDS companies. The market is
dominated by just four: TravelPort, Amadeus, Sabre and Pegasus. However, some
of the all of these also have a customer facing website. There’s really not
much you can do on it except to check if your ticket is really confirmed or not
or to view your itinerary. Only ViewTrip goes a little further to offer Passport
and Visa information, Local Things to see and do as well as relevant travel
advice. However they are worth checking out, if only for a peek into the system
that runs global travel.
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