Sabre

Imagine a world where booking a flight required traveling to the airport or waiting three hours on the phone with a reservations agent who would record your information on a handwritten card, only to arrive for your flight and discover another passenger assigned to “your” seat.

In 1953, when R. Blair Smith, an IBM salesman, and C. R. Smith, the president of American Airlines, were randomly seated next to each other on a cross-country flight, this was the status quo in airline travel. But their chance encounter would spark a dramatic change. A conversation that began with discovering their common surname would lead to the invention of Sabre, the world’s first centralized airline reservation system. It would go on to not only revolutionize the travel business but also unleash the movement toward instantaneous e-commerce.

In the course of their fateful conversation, C.R. Smith lamented to Blair Smith that due to computing limitations, American Airlines could not track passenger information. “I told [C.R.] I was going back to study a computer that had the possibility of doing more than just keeping availability,” Blair Smith recalled. “It could even keep a record of the passenger’s name, the passenger’s itinerary, and, if you like, his phone number. Mr. C.R. Smith was intrigued by this. He took out a card and wrote a special phone number on the back. He said, ‘Now, Blair, when you get through with your school, our reservation center is at LaGuardia Airport. You go out there and look it over. Then you write me a letter and tell me what we ought to do.’”

Blair Smith relayed the encounter to IBM President Thomas J. Watson Jr., who agreed that Blair should follow C.R.’s advice, setting the wheels in motion for an invention that C.R. Smith and Watson Jr. would, in a joint statement several years later, profess to be “as dramatic an improvement as the jet airplane.” While seemingly hyperbolic at the time, the declaration would prove to be an accurate prediction of the technology’s impact and reach.

Sabre linked computers at American Airlines reservation desks around the country to a central processing center, creating a network for sharing data and information about flights worldwide. To find available flights between cities, reservation agents would select the Air Information Card specific to that route and insert it into a desk console. They would press buttons indicating passengers’ preferred dates and the number of travelers, then press the Availability button. This would automatically transmit the data to the airline’s processing center in New York, by way of more than 10,400 miles of telephone lines.

By the mid-1960s, Sabre was handling 7,500 reservations an hour, cutting the time to process a reservation from an average of 90 minutes to several seconds.