Eastman predicts that the GDSs will be supplanted in part by travel firms doing "online, real-time packaging" of airline seats along with hotel rooms and ground transportation, getting a higher markup than the individual airline or hotel could. [Computerworld]

At one time, Bob Crandall (then CEO of American Airlines) said that given the choice, he'd keep SABRE and sell the airline. How times have changed. Some of the best times in my professional career came while working at Sabre. Richard Eastman's conclusion that the "GDSs will be supplanted in part by travel firms doing "online, real-time packaging" of airline seats along with hotel rooms and ground transportation" sounds odd, given that this whole story is one of disintermediation. But there's something to it; though the vendors would like for every traveler to book direct, people still want the convenience of buying everything in one place.

This story reminds me that I wanted to write up my own version of how Galileo came to Web Services, someday. There's also sidebar that quotes Jeremy Wertheimer. Though it's funny that the article says " Wertheimer also claims that it's much easier to write complex operations, such as complicated fare comparisons, in modern programming languages than writing them to run under TPF. ", when Jeremy's company, ITA, is best known for being a LISP shop. If SABRE was developed in the early '60s, LISP predates it by a few years, at least.