The system's parent company is organized into three business units: Sabre is headquartered in Southlake, Texas,[1] and has many employees in various locations around the world.
The name of the travel reservation system is an abbreviation for "Semi-automated Business Research Environment", and was originally styled in all-capital letters as SABRE.
This part of the process was not all that slow, at least when there were not that many planes, but the entire end-to-end task of looking for a flight, reserving a seat, and then writing up the ticket could take up to three hours in some cases, and 90 minutes on average.
[citation needed] American Airlines had already attacked the problem to some degree, and was in the process of introducing their new Magnetronic Reservisor, an electromechanical computer, in 1952 to replace the card files.
Using this system, a large number of operators could access information simultaneously, so the ticket agents could be told via phone if a seat was available.
[6] Just prior to this chance meeting, IBM had been working with the United States Air Force on their Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project.
SAGE used a series of large computers to coordinate the message flow from radar sites to interceptors, dramatically reducing the time needed to direct an attack on an incoming bomber.
[3] Smith and Watson observed that the SAGE system's basic architecture was suitable for use in American Airlines' booking services.
Teleprinters would be placed at American Airlines' ticketing offices to send in requests and receive responses directly, without the need for anyone on the other end of the phone.
[citation needed] Thirty days later IBM sent a research proposal to American Airlines, suggesting that they join forces to study the problem.
The operating system component of PARS evolved into ACP (Airlines Control Program), and later to TPF (Transaction Processing Facility).
Congress investigated these practices, and in 1983 Bob Crandall, president of American, vocally defended the airline's preferential treatment of its own offerings in the system.
"The preferential display of our flights, and the corresponding increase in our market share, is the competitive raison d'être for having created the system in the first place," he told them.
American brought High Court action which alleged that after the arrival of Sabre on its doorstep British Airways immediately offered financial incentives to travel agents who continued to use Travicom and would tie any override commissions to it.
It connected 49 subscribing international airlines (including British Airways, British Caledonian, TWA, Pan American World Airways, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Air France, Lufthansa, SAS, Air Canada, KLM, Alitalia, Cathay Pacific and JAL) to thousands of travel agents in the UK.