Industry quiet giants could power total tourism sustainability

The GDS back-office functions of the travel industry – could deliver good jobs, protect environment and more

Pretty much everybody in the travel industry knows Sabre and Amadeus. After all, they power the industry – making global tourism what it is today.

In the 1960’s airline fares had to be manually calculated and tickets physically written. Not only that – airline returns (for each individual carrier) had to be created by hand every month. Even in those days this represented an enormous amount of work and an enormous amount of paper – plus the power of specialist fare calculating and route calculating gurus – a great job if you were in the know!

Enter American Airline’s solution. In 1960 SABRE – Semi Automatic Business Research Environment was launched and a new era was ushered in. First the system dealt with airline reservations and then with everything related to travel – hotels, car hire – the lot. All of this was delivered to the travel agents screen.

And now an independent Sabre services 425,000 travel agents with offers from 420 airlines, 750,000 hotel properties, 260 tour operators, 52 rail carriers and 39 car hire organizations. Sabre employs about 9,000 people.

For this good idea whose time had come – there was of course competition. The major rival to Sabre was Amadeus – set up by in 1987 by a consortium of European airlines including Air France and Lufthansa.

Amadeus now services 90,000 travel agents with offers from 435 airlines, 51 cruise lines, 280 hotel chains and 29 car rental companies – it has around 10,000 employees.

And there is big money in this activity – Sabre is valued at $7billion and Amadeus at €19billion.

And so there should be – Sabre alone takes the hassle out of a cool 1.5billion daily transactions.

So, the Global Distribution Networks – based in USA and Europe are the simple reason why the travel industry has grown so big so quickly.

Clearly their interest is in making sure that the travel industry survives sustainably and that travel agents are very, very successful and committed.

They are both heavily into Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability (as though they were two different activities!)

Amadeus launched the ill-fated ‘Massive Good’ project some 6 years ago in an effort to solve the Millennium Development Goals, Unfortunately since then it has demised – however Amadeus is still involved in a range of CSR projects for emissions reduction, social good and, generally sustainable tourism see HERE

Sabre was a founder member of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and so took a rather more prominent industry role until recently. It too has a range of Corporate Social Responsibility/Sustainable Tourism projects.

For instance it has taken a major role in the ‘Passport to Freedom’  and ECPAT initiatives to end human trafficking.

Both Sabre and Amadeus are clearly well-meaning and involved in myriad projects to make the world a better place.

But somehow there appears something missing – the will both to publicize these projects and to engage their enormous distribution network of 500,000+ travel agents around the world to understand and engage in truly sustainable tourism,

Valere Tjolle