AirNZ is a Sabre customer, and their travel agents used it directly for years, but had such a steep learning curve that they built a wrapper for it - still a command line system, but divided the screen into quadrants to display different colors information, and some macros that automated some common tasks.
Despite the simplification, it still took 2 weeks full time training before agents could use it, and even then the first week was as a buddy system where you had someone helping you for a week (most of that time was learning the system, but also included time to learn all the three letter airport codes and other acronyms used for reservations).
Some old timers would switch down to Sabre for complicated tasks because it was faster than using the wrapper and it was amazing to watch them interact with the system.
One colleague I worked with had been with the airline for nearly 50 years and remembered pre-computer days where the ‘booking system’ was just a big shared blackboard.
> GDS systems, however, did not adapt with them.
Air New Zealand was one of the earliest airlines to experiment with different fare classes (premium economy, ‘saver’ fares with no baggage etc) and better tools (flexible date search), I remember being involved with RFQs with Sabre and competitors to enable a flexible date search of +/- 3 days the quotes coming back for sometime like 9 months of development for a crazy amount like $2M. Maybe doesn’t sound like much now, but back in 2000, revenue from online sales hadn’t yet even crossed $1M per year, so that single feature cost more than 2 years of online revenue.
This was the incentive for AirNZ to invest early in their own internal software development which was a very smart move- as it allowed us to experiment and give customers features that even our larger competitor (QANTAS) couldn’t match.
I’m so happy I got to experience all of that- definitely the highlight of my career to date.