Latin American carrier Lan Airlines selected Sabre to provide reservations and operational systems. Lan will follow such carriers as
JetBlue and
WestJet in deploying the Sabre Sonic Customer Sales and Service product.
WestJet CEO Sean Durfy today acknowledged that the challenges stemming from the
switchover to Sabre's reservation system "are carrying on longer then we originally anticipated."
In the next weeks and months a lot of digital ink will be spilled on the new
HP-AMR deal for "Jetstream" passenger service system for the AA group of airlines and in the process dump SABRE as the core system.
What are these implications?
Here is my little list:
The slow painful lack of progress with the Air Canada reservations project known as
Polaris has come to a dead stop with AC writing off C$67 million. More importantly, the depth of the work left to do was an astonishing C$40 million. This clearly indicates that the project was no where near done. Even if you discount a large amount of money for implementation, there is a clear indication that this project had some significant hills to climb to reach an "implementable" solution. Sadly, ITA Software is left without its anchor customer for what is a significant amount of their future revenue expectation. And the big winner in all this?
