The technology revolution gave birth to one of the most effective business tool called
e-commerce that could change everything around the business process and its dimensions to
reach the customer. In unit 1 of the course material we were able to understand the significant
role of the Information technology and e-commerce in tourism sector. The emergence of
electronic median into Indian markets during 1990s brought about huge turnaround in the
businesses and intense changes that empowered consumers of the tourism industry. Large
number of people linked the emergence of modern travel distribution with the dawn of
the Internet in e-commerce during the beginning of the 20thcentury. But in fact, internet
commerce in tourism and travel had already experienced the “dot-com” explosion even in
the beginning of 1970s in the and slowly become common platform during the late 1980s.
The information technology and systems powered electronic version of travel industry with
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the origination of CRS (Computerised Reservation System). These CRSs played critical role
in changing the demand level for tourism and increasing the efficiency of the participants
with better accessibility. Later, after a decade the CRSs got transformed into GDS (Global
Distribution System).
The GDSs were very successful in offering the requirements of the tourism service
providers as well as the consumers. These systems were the pioneers in facilitating Business
to Business mode of electronic channel in the 1970s. The famous American based GDS
organisation called SABRE came together with an UK based Apollo Inc to start planting
their propriety in-house reservations systems in travel agencies. Before this, the traditional
travel agents vested excessive time duration for registering the reservation by doing it
manually. Many airline companies understood that adapting to information technology for
their reservation process would make them more efficient and competitive in the market by
reducing the time and effort taken to accomplish the reservation process.
The service producers realised that the technology oriented internet based travel
agents could make the process more productive and specifically support airlines by acting
as an extension of the marketing centre. Classical examples for the worldwide realization
of electronic market coordination are the emergence of CRS and GD Sin to the travel and
tourism industry. As the intensified competition is traced alongside rapid changes in the
technological system there are questions about the relevance and the life of the existing
distributions systems and scope for evolving these systems
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The existing distribution systems like CRS and GDS have already travelled quite
a period of time in the western countries and at least a decade in the developing Asian
countries like India.They actually originate from the aviation sector and of the travel
industry. With the origination of commercial flights, the aviation companies required an
efficient system to consent to travel agents to work on their behalf to make bookings and
reservations for their flights.
Later due to the explosion of mass tourism, the GDS systems were modified so
that they could also take care of the hotel booking and reservations, renting cars, cruises,
packages including golf experience and various other things that are required for the tourists
and facilitated by the travel agents. Deflecting into the leisure market demands, the GDSs
were modified and redesigned to diversify their portfolio in order to gain advantage of
their technological business components and network as well as economies of scale. Such
changes supported the distributions systems to deliver diversified services to the diversified
customer segments and fought against the challenge of business market saturation.
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With this introduction this unit will discuss the functions of the GDS and offer
comparison with the CRS and other distribution systems. The unit also looks to throw light
on the evolution and development of the tourism distribution system and assess the cases of
the major GDS systems like Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, World span and Abacus in the current
tourism scenario. Finally it will elucidate the models of the GDS and CRS and the changes
happening across the world.
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