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The industry is moving to a being able to purchase products instead of complete PSS/GDS solutions. As an airline you'll be able to buy an inventory management system from Amadeus, a pricing system from Sabre, a support system from TravelSky, and a website from Travelport.

The best example I can think of is American. They have Amadeus running their international website. Their ticketing system is internal. And all their inventory is managed in Sabre.

Southwest was similar, for a while Amadeus ran their international site while Southwest ran an outdated internal system for domestic travel that didnt support flights leaving and arriving on different days. They eventually had Amadeus move into running their domestic stuff a few years ago and now they have red-eyes.

Delta runs all their own stuff on a mainframe and from the outside it looked like a slow moving disaster. I know Amadeus sees all their inventory and looks at each passenger.

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> They eventually had Amadeus move into running their domestic stuff a few years ago and now they have red-eyes.

Heh. I remember thinking years back that it was odd that Southwest never had any overnight flights, especially transcontinental. Just assumed it was the way they did business and some sort of cost cutting measure. Didn't think it'd be due to a software limitation!

> due to a software limitation

This _is_ a cost cutting measure. They decided not to pay for their software to support red eyes.

In case someone is as confused as me wth the discussion is about (never heard that jargon):

> In commercial aviation, a red-eye flight is a flight scheduled to depart at night and arrive the next morning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-eye_flight

Well, it was due to cost cutting! The point of using an in-house solution was that it was cheaper than buying a reservation system.

Same thing for free bags, it’s because their system couldn’t handle chargeable bags

really!? They've done a helluva' job making this into a great marketing campaign, but this seems too far fetched to be true.

Can anyone else comment/confirm?

Not true. They upsell things like "early bird", since 2009 for example. And they charged for bicycle boxes as long ago as the early 90's. Charging for bags would use the same setup.

They do have some notable historical challenges though. Like foreign currency. They still cannot do that, despite flying to Costa Rica, Mexico, etc.

Bags aren’t managed in the same way as other ancillaries, because the prices are not linear. Indeed they allowed some special bags , but agents would have to manually check the aircraft was not over subscribed and organise handovers...

Regarding foreign currency, it’s a strategy choice on their behalf, they don’t want to own sales offices outside the USA

Trust me, I know a lot about this particular topic :)

They already "handle bags" in the sense that they are tracked to the PNR, issue tags, etc. They just don't charge for them. My examples show that they can charge for ancillaries. In fact, they charge for a 3rd bag or overweight today. It's not a technical limitation.

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