unit of the MARS-1 at the
JR East Railway Museum in Saitama, September 2015.
MARS-1 The
MARS-1 train ticket reservation system was designed and planned in the 1950s by the
Japanese National Railways' R&D Institute, now the
Railway Technical Research Institute, with the system eventually being produced by
Hitachi in 1958. It was the world's first seat reservation system for trains. The MARS-1 was capable of reserving seat positions, and was controlled by a
transistor computer with a
central processing unit and a 400,000-bit magnetic drum memory unit to hold seating files. It used many
registers, to indicate whether seats in a train were vacant or reserved to accelerate searches of and updates to seat patterns, for communications with terminals, printing reservation notices, and
CRT displays. By the time SABRE was fully completed in December 1964, it was the world's first
online transaction processing system, and at the time, "the world's largest private real time commercial
data processing system". Other airlines established their own systems.
Pan Am launched its PANAMAC system in 1965 and
Delta Air Lines launched DELTAMATIC in 1965, both of which had been developed by IBM alongside SABRE as part of the SABER joint project (and then American insisted on a different name for its project, resulting in the name SABRE). DELTAMATIC was followed by the Delta Automated Travel Account System (DATAS) in 1968. In 1965, IBM generalized its work on the SABER joint project into
Programmed Airline Reservation System (PARS), which became the industry standard by 1971. From 1971 to 1973, American migrated SABRE to a PARS-based system. Soon, travel agents began pushing for a system that could automate their side of the process by accessing the various ARSes directly to make reservations. Fearful this would place too much power in the hands of agents, American Airlines executive
Robert Crandall proposed creating an industry-wide computer reservation system to be a central clearing house for U.S. travel; other airlines demurred on the basis that this could violate
United States antitrust law.
Travel agent access In 1976, United Airlines began offering its Apollo system to travel agents; while it would not allow the agents to book tickets on United's competitors, the marketing value of the convenient terminal proved indispensable. SABRE, PARS, and DATAS were soon released to travel agents as well. Following
airline deregulation in 1978, an efficient CRS proved particularly important; by some counts,
Texas Air executive
Frank Lorenzo purchased money-losing
Eastern Air Lines specifically to gain control of its SystemOne CRS. Also in 1976
Videcom international with
British Airways,
British Caledonian and CCL launched
Travicom, the world's first multi-access reservations system (wholly based on Videcom technology), forming a network providing distribution for initially two and subsequently 49 subscribing international airlines (including British Airways, British Caledonian,
Trans World Airlines,
Pan Am,
Qantas,
Singapore Airlines,
Air France,
Lufthansa,
Scandinavian Airlines System,
Air Canada,
KLM,
Alitalia,
Cathay Pacific and
Japan Airlines) to thousands of travel agents in the UK. It allowed agents and airlines to communicate via a common distribution language and network, handling 97% of UK airline business trade bookings by 1987. The system went on to be replicated by Videcom in other areas of the world including the Middle East (DMARS), New Zealand, Kuwait (KMARS), Ireland, Caribbean, United States and Hong Kong. Travicom was a trading name for Travel Automation Services Ltd. When British Airways (who by then owned 100% of Travel Automation Services Ltd) chose to participate in the development of the Galileo system Travicom changed its trading name to Galileo UK and a migration process was put in place to move agencies from Travicom to Galileo. European airlines also began to invest in the field in the 1980s initially by deploying their own reservation systems in their homeland, propelled by growth in demand for travel as well as technological advances which allowed GDSes to offer ever-increasing services and searching power. In 1987, a consortium led by Air France and West Germany's Lufthansa developed
Amadeus, modeled on SystemOne. Amadeus Global Travel Distribution was launched in 1992. In 1990, Delta,
Northwest Airlines, and Trans World Airlines formed
Worldspan, and in 1993, another consortium (including British Airways, KLM, and
United Airlines, among others) formed the competing company
Galileo GDS based on Apollo. Numerous smaller companies such as KIU have also formed, aimed at niche markets not catered for by the four largest networks, including the
low-cost carrier segment, and small and medium size domestic and regional airlines. ==Trends==