Global distribution system

If you take more recently, in terms of from a sort of travel element, you know, you had Dubai this year, and that was a real live situation where suddenly it happened over the weekend and suddenly you have to you have certain travelers who are stranded in a country and and what do you do and and it's sort of looking from a sort of travel perspective and i think this will be interesting for travel advisors it's sort of looking at all what was possible you know i heard sort of crazy stories about you know and we looked at those routes of oman go to oman get out go to saudi get out they were fraught with because you had to sort of drive across borders, you know, go across the border on a sort of, you know, another car, have another car meet you.

In the end with Dubai, which was quite an interesting one, was that the GDS was selling...

Which was the reservation system.

Yes, the GDS system was selling that there were seats available, even though Emirates had officially closed, you know, it officially had said the airspace was closed.

we started to notice that flights were flying each day.

And so we had four travelers and suddenly we said, you know, there's one available tomorrow.

Not try and tell them, you know, because that's wrong.

A lot of people do tell them it's wrong.

Beyond the growing divide between Russian and global skies, the country's aviation industry is also experiencing a new digital divide.

You see, whether it be a hotel in Zanzibar, a rental car company in Jeju, or a regional airline in Guatemala, the entire world of travel is all connected by the Global Distribution System, the GDS.

At the simplest level, the GDS is a common connected way to communicate and book inventory between travel providers.

This and other back-end communication is crucial for airlines in particular since they rely so heavily on bookings originating from third-party online travel agencies like Google Flights, Expedia, or Skyscanner, and also on selling tickets that include flights operated by other airlines.

When a passenger flies Delta from Seattle to Amsterdam then connects on KLM to Athens, Delta and KLM systems need to communicate.

If they didn't, the passenger wouldn't be able to get their KLM boarding pass when checking in in Seattle, they wouldn't be able to check their bag all the way through to Athens, they wouldn't be able to get help from KLM if a Delta delay led to a missed connection.

Back-end communication is crucial for the cohesive travel experience from airline to airline.

Now, GDS software is essentially run by three companies, Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport.

In fact, specifically it entered this: AD to initiate an availability lookup, 08FEB to indicate the date, then DENLHR to specify Denver as the origin and London as the destination.

This initiates a query from the GDS system to another, OAG, which essentially acts as the definitive source of airline scheduling data worldwide.

The GDS then comes back and spits out two options, one by British Airways, one by United.

The strings of letters and numbers indicate availability across the different fare classes, then the right side provides most other data: departure time, arrival time, aircraft type, and flight duration.

But the fare data is still missing.

For that, Google Flights needs to pick a flight, pick a fare class, then enter another query for its price.

But the GDS doesn't have that data itself.

It seeks the answer from the airline tariff publishing company, which, similarly to the OAG with scheduling, is the one-stop shop for pricing data used by essentially every major airline globally.