eaasySabre

» see easysabre.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

eaasySabre lived and died inside the American online service era, which never shipped a Turkish edition. It launched in 1985, when I was one year old. It closed in 1999, when I had been online for about a year on a line that was for chat and for downloading things, and when nobody I knew put a credit card into a modem for any reason at all. Flights in that world were bought at a counter from a person with a terminal.

The system underneath it was much older than the product. Sabre was a 1960s airline reservation network built by American Airlines with IBM, the sort of infrastructure that normally stays behind a professional. What American did in 1985 was open a narrow consumer door into it and call the door EAASY SABRE, with the doubled A that the airline put on everything it branded. You dialed in through CompuServe or GEnie, and later through Prodigy and America Online, and you queried the same seat inventory a travel agent was looking at.

It was not a friendly product by any modern reading. The interface was numbered text menus, and CompuServe shipped subscribers a printed manual of keystroke shortcuts so you could skip past the menus you already knew. Behind some of it, human agents were still doing part of the work. People used it anyway, in numbers large enough to settle the argument about whether travelers wanted to do this themselves.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The thing worth remembering is the shape of the transaction. You were not browsing an inventory that somebody had prepared for shopping. You were issuing queries against an industrial reservation system that had been designed for trained operators, through a text pipe, at modem speed, while being billed by the minute by whichever online service you had dialed into.

That is why the shortcut manual existed. Every keystroke you saved was connect time you did not pay for. The product's real design constraint was not usability in the way anyone means it now. It was the meter running underneath the session.

~ what got buried with it ~

Terry Jones ran EAASY SABRE as Sabre's chief information officer, and in 1995 he led the team that took the same idea to the web. Travelocity went live in 1996 with the part of eaasySabre that worked, the direct consumer query, wrapped in something a person could look at.

Within three years the child had replaced the parent. Sabre announced in 1999 that it would phase eaasySabre out on 15 June to concentrate on Travelocity, and the number it gave for the old service was under one percent of the new one. The final version of easySabre, renamed by then and with its capital letters sanded off, existed mostly to hand you a link to Travelocity.

~ what came after ~

Every airline site with a booking widget is running the eaasySabre argument, which is that the reservation system should answer to the passenger directly. The travel agency counter did not disappear because the web was invented. It disappeared because a text menu on CompuServe proved in 1985 that people would rather do it themselves, and the industry spent the next fifteen years catching up to its own experiment.

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