10th anniversary for first airline online booking engine
SITA INC (Information Networking Computing), a global air transport IT company, today celebrates the 10th anniversary of the launch of the world’s first airline booking engine which SITA developed for British Midland Airways.
About 400 million passengers globally now book their flights over the Internet yearly.
The airline industry is now saving an estimated $1.2 billion a year by not having to pay GDS reservation system fees for the tickets sold online, said SITA.
In October 1995 there was a meeting in a pub between SITA software development engineers and the IT people from British Midland. The budget was $50,000 with a deadline to come up with something in time for the Christmas.
Organising domain names, deciding on and testing what browsers to support and obtaining even basic internet access were a painful process,” recalled SITA’s Senior Vice-President for Passenger and Travel Solutions, Richard Stokes.
By the first week of December 1995, some seven weeks after the project had started, a system was available which allowed passengers not only to book online but to search for low fares across a date range, book two-for-one companion fares and to pay online, using a choice of credit cards protected by SSL (still the commonest form of data protection on the internet).
Testing was completed by the evening of December 10 and the system was cut-over ready to go live the following day. British Midland did a lot to encourage booking even painting their website address on their aircraft, and the first booking was made by a passenger traveling from Paris to London. Along with many others traveling that week, he received a bottle of champagne from the airline. The era of buying airline seats online had begun.
David
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