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Hey folks, welcome back to Stay Ahead TV. I'm your host, Austin Wright, chatting with
Chief Technology Officer, Robert Wiseman. Robert, how are you doing today?
I'm good, Austin, thanks.
Fantastic. Now you've not just worked for Sabre ― you've worked for Orbitz ― other
GDSs in the marketplace, and I want to get your perspective on what is the value of a
GDS in the travel industry today?
It's fairly significant. From a shopping perspective, the numbers of messages that
we support for pure shopping transactions ― so if somebody gets on a website or they
call a travel agent or whatever, and does a call to make a shopping request, we process
― we have about 1,000 servers handling just shopping transactions.
If we didn't have that in place and those requests ― whether availability calls or
shopping calls ― were to hit directly to airline systems, it would be a fairly significant
impact and cost on those systems.
When I was at Orbitz, I was in charge of GDS bypassing. I was responsible for creating
the first GDS bypass for Orbitz, because it was actually created to create a competitive
position to the GDSs.
And while the technology did its thing initially, we understood that the potential clumsiness
of a solution like that ― the point solutions that involved ― and really, a short-term
view of being able to scale out a one-off solution like an Orbitz Direct Connect option.
So, certainly the GDSs provide very great value to not only to the suppliers, but also
to the consumers, because in its simplest sense, the GDSs present a marketplace for
suppliers of content, consumers of content, to come together and transact their businesses.
We do that at massive scale ― 60,000 transactions a second, 1 billion API calls a day, thousands
of transactions to support shopping requests a second.
I guess then efficiency / transparency is the major goal for everything that you do.
Yeah, and also it provides a single shopping place. Imagine that if you wanted to buy any
particular product from a grocery store, but you could only get a certain kind of dog food,
and you had to go to each different store to look at a different type of dog food, the
amount of time that would take would be ridiculous.
It's problematic.
We create a one-stop shop for people to come and look and compare different suppliers'
prices and content within a single viewpoint.
That sounds fantastic to me. Very good. Thank you, Robert, for your time today. I appreciate
it. Alright, folks. Thanks again for joining us today on Stay Ahead. We'll see you next
time. I appreciate it.