Travel News

If Sabre Goes Down, Do This to Keep Travel on Track

Without a printed confirmation and boarding pass, the airline might not always have a record you exist. That scary situation fast became a reality for flyers around the world when the Sabre system went down for three hours or Monday. The Sabre system is back up now, but delays remain. For every one flight directly affected by the Sabre outage, four additional flights were affected as well.

The average flyer does not know of or use Sabre, but it is the system that is used by 300 airports and 100 airlines including American, Jet Blue, Frontier, Alaska, Virgin American, Qantas and others. In fact, it processes over 300 million passengers a year. And when the system goes down, an airline loses its reservation system in terms of tracking of reservations, passengers and flights.

If the Sabre system goes down, there remains very little manual override available except to hand-write tickets and boarding passes, which still requires the airline to have a record of your reservation. Passengers can put themselves ahead of the chaos by coming prepared. Always have on hand at the airport a printed copy of your reservation and if possible a printed copy of your boarding pass.

Watch Peter’s CBS This Morning report to see how Sabre controls our travel infrastructure and what you can do keep travel on track.

For a little history on Sabre, don’t miss: