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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

> To book a seat, the operator would have to find the flight’s index card, mark it to indicate the booked seat, and write the flight ticket out by hand. The process would take 90 minutes for each reservation.

While it sounds horribly inefficient, I can't understand what sort of archaic process can make reserving a ticket a 1.5 hours task. Any ideas?

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I don't really understand either. Sounds like it should take no more than 10 minutes for a somewhat experienced operator.

Find the flight's index card: 1 minute Indicate the booked seat: 0.5 minutes Return the flight's index card: 1 minute Write flight ticket out by hand: 2.5 minutes

That seems a very conservative estimate to me. What happens during the other 85 minutes?

I think it is more to it than that. The index card only tells them that a seat is available. They also need to read other documents to find out which fares are available and match that to the seat. There are probably specific conditions for that fare that need to be applied and may require calling the agent or or someone else to confirm. If the seat is too expensive or the fare is unavailable, they need to reset the index card, pick a new one and repeat the process.

I imagine arranging payments was also part of the 90-min average.

I have to assume that's a typo, and the author meant 90 seconds.

Either that, or there's a big queue in the middle of the day where an operator would take down the reservation request, put it in an already-tall stack, and only call the travel agent back 90 minutes later on average.

But since a queue would be highly variable, 90 seconds seems much more likely.

They mention a table has 8 operators only. I'm guessing the 90 minutes includes the client waiting time on the phone.

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