Article Review Retrospective - Selling Seats. Article Critique

Article Review
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Article Review
The article “Selling Seats” by Michele McDonald portrays how computers revolutionized the airline industry. Before 1964, airlines used paperwork to facilitate bookings of flights. The idea of coming up with a computer system to enhance the process of reservation was initiated by two seatmates, namely Blair, an American Airlines chief executive and Smith, a salesperson of the International Business Machines (IBM). Blair was looking for something radical to make flight bookings easy while Smith was selling computers. That is how IBM got the contract of developing a system that would ensure the smooth running of operations at Blair’s airline. IBM incorporated the idea of real-time computing, which it had acquired from the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a Norad air defense project (McDonald, 2004). For this reason, the introduction of computer reservation systems in the airline industry occurred during the era of economic regulation.
The first airline reservation system to be developed was known as Sabre, which was designed to cater to the needs of the internal American flights. The primary focus was on developing a system that would incorporate at least ten of the biggest airlines in the United States of America (USA). The Air Traffic Conference (ATC), which was a branch of the Air Transport that oversaw the functionalities of agency programs, declared that no airline was allowed to implement its own system (McDonald, 2004). In other words, the agency wanted to be an exclusive vendor and avoid competition from other agencies that were developing computer systems. However, the US Department of Justice said that ATC was monopolizing the airline market, which the government cannot allow. For this reason, airlines were allowed to implement their own systems without restrictions from any vendor. Eastern and Delta Airlines had their systems installed by 1968. The TWA, United, and American started installing their systems, namely PARS, Apollo, and Sabre, to other travelling agencies (McDonald, 2004). Consequently, the race of implementing computer systems to American airlines turned to a business rivalry.
The primary reason why agencies were competing to have the most significant market share was that those who had a fully functional system charged others a transactional fee for every booked flight. The computer systems displayed major carriers and their fares. The power of computer reservation systems began when airlines found that those schedules at the top of the screen received many flight bookings. As such, airline-owners started tinkering with system owners so that their flights would appear first. However, in 1978, the airline industry was deregulated, which led to new complexities in flight booking schedules and fares (McDonald, 2004). The deregulation resulted in frustrations of airline executives since it led to the mistrust between customers and travel agencies. W...