Shares Computer System? Or Sabre?

[usa1]

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11858841/1/delta-ceo-offered-merger-tip-to-us-airways-ceo.html

Delta CEO says go with Sabre ......

 

[wings396]

For the time being, I'm sure they will. As you know US already uses Sabre on the ops side, and used the res partition prior to the merger with HP.

 

[nycbusdriver]

Amadeus

 

[UPNAWAY]

rock Me Amadeus, rock me

 

[wings396]

Maybe at a later time, but I think that going with Sabre for the cutover would be best. Obviously everyone at AA knows it, and a good portion of the US employees should be able to pick it up quickly since many of them have used it in the past. From what I recall, the RES partition was easy to use, even for those of us on the ops side.

 

[767jetz]

"Adopt and go." Use Sabre and save yourselves a whole bunch of headaches.

Our inept management at United, mostly from the former Continental, wanted to use a "best practice" approach instead of "adopt and go." Turns out that THEY decided that Continental's way was usually "best." So rather than following the lead of Delta, and overlaying the systems of the larger airline on the smaller one, they thought it was smart to re-train (minimally) the larger group of employees on a totally new system - Shares. Not to mention the slew of I.T. problems. As a result we had the disaster of summer 2012, and lost a lot of business. Everything from ticketing, to boarding, to weight and balance was affected.

I don't envy the position you are in with this merger right now. But in the long run I do envy you for your management. I think UAL will have a hard time competing down the road until we purge the upper office space in Willis Tower and get some new blood on the top.

 

[nycbusdriver]

"Adopt and go." Use Sabre and save yourselves a whole bunch of headaches.

Our inept management at United, mostly from the former Continental, wanted to use a "best practice" approach instead of "adopt and go." Turns out that THEY decided that Continental's way was usually "best." So rather than following the lead of Delta, and overlaying the systems of the larger airline on the smaller one, they thought it was smart to re-train (minimally) the larger group of employees on a totally new system - Shares. Not to mention the slew of I.T. problems. As a result we had the disaster of summer 2012, and lost a lot of business. Everything from ticketing, to boarding, to weight and balance was affected.

I don't envy the position you are in with this merger right now. But in the long run I do envy you for your management. I think UAL will have a hard time competing down the road until we purge the upper office space in Willis Tower and get some new blood on the top.

Are they really in Willis Tower? What a waste of resources simply for bragging rights. Unless, of course, office space in Chicago is so plentiful that Willis Tower signed a give-away deal.

 

[BungeeJumper]

Hopefully SABRE. Back when I worked for Alaska as a Customer Service Agent, we converted from SHARES to SABRE. Having worked on both, I can tell you that SABRE is far superior to SHARES. I was really disappointed when US chose to go with SHARES after the US/HP merger. Hopefully they've learned their lesson.

 

[SS255]

Are they really in Willis Tower? What a waste of resources simply for bragging rights. Unless, of course, office space in Chicago is so plentiful that Willis Tower signed a give-away deal.

Yes. They moved their headquarters from Elk Grove (still in use) to the Willis Tower a few years ago. I've been to both -- and concur that they must be paying a mint for the bragging rights. The money would have been much better spent on a better reservation system than Shares.

Jeff Smisek held an audience in November for some United frequent flyers, and I was in attendance. One of the (pre-fabbed) questions was "Seriously. Why Shares?" The (pre-fabbed) response he gave was that A) UA has an ownership stake in Shares, so it made sense from a cost perspective (spoken by a true bean-counter), and Shares had a better ability to offer "dynamic pricing" to nickel-and-dime customers.

Unfortunately, Shares cannot do a lot of the things that UA's old system (Apollo, I believe?) was able to do -- such as easily re-book passengers during irregular operations. What used to take two minutes to accomplish now takes 20. Where is your cost savings there?

 

[necigrad]

Having seen some of both systems I think saying one is better then the other is foolish. Why? Because EVERY airline is different! UA and US SABRE is COMPLETLY different. You can do things in CO SHARES that you couldn't in HP SHARES and vise versa.

Want to make an intelligent systems comment? Advocate not using 30+ year old computer systems. Get a new system that's fast and up to date. Let's get a system that's designed as a GUI and not have a clunky overlay. New airline? Let's set the pace and get a system that actually meets OUR needs and not the needs as determined by a programmer. "I'd like to do X." "Well, the system can't do that. We can put in a workaround doing A and B that will give you a similar result." This should not be acceptable. We're well into the 21st century now, let's get out of the 70's.

 

[nycbusdriver]

Want to make an intelligent systems comment? Advocate not using 30+ year old computer systems. Get a new system that's fast and up to date. Let's get a system that's designed as a GUI and not have a clunky overlay. New airline? Let's set the pace and get a system that actually meets OUR needs and not the needs as determined by a programmer. "I'd like to do X." "Well, the system can't do that. We can put in a workaround doing A and B that will give you a similar result." This should not be acceptable. We're well into the 21st century now, let's get out of the 70's.

Amadeus

 

[700UW]

UA doesnt use Sabre, didnt they have Apollo now shares with CO?

 

[SparrowHawk]

ALL of the legacy GDS's are between 35 and 50 years old. SHARES got it's start at Eastern as System One which was the primary reason Lorenzo acquired EA.

As to Amadeus it is indeed a modern system and if AA/US decides to do something different alliance wise (staying in Star) Amadeus is Star's preferred platform.

 

[necigrad]

UA did (and maybe still does) use SABRE, just not for res. It's COMPLETLY different from US SABRE.

 

[nycbusdriver]

ALL of the legacy GDS's are between 35 and 50 years old. SHARES got it's start at Eastern as System One which was the primary reason Lorenzo acquired EA.

As to Amadeus it is indeed a modern system and if AA/US decides to do something different alliance wise (staying in Star) Amadeus is Star's preferred platform.

True, but Star Alliance doesn't have a monopoly lock on Amadeus. It's an independent system. And, I believe, SWA is going to transition to Amadeus simply because it's the most modern and versatile out there right now.