At the time the Central Reservations Office (CRO) was in Peoria, Illinois. My mother started with Ozark Reservations in 1967. In the late 70's PSA purchased a computer reservations system from Cathay Pacific airlines call CPARS which operated like most of the popular airline reservation systems at the time (SABRE, PARS, etc.) When a reservation was made, one (or more) units were subtracted from the available inventory and then a separate program kept the list of names for the reservations (unlike the PNR of later systems that contained all in one record). The agents would use a terminal (Bunko-Ramo) originally designed for stock brokering to check on availability of flights and then make reservations. This was replaced by an inventory control computer system. If the flight was not listed on the board, the agent would write up the information on a card the size of a business card and send it to inventory control. Close to full, they would call inventory control and get a yes or no for the number of reservations needed. When an agent received a call, they would look on their flight schedule and then check the big board up front for flights that were closed or close to full. This photo shows the PSA (Pacific Southwest Airlines) reservation center in San Diego in the 60's. At destination you waited 2-3-4 minutes for the baggage cart to be rolled into the gate by a strong man, and when noticing that your bag was at the bottom, then you stepped aside while other people emptied the baggage cart from the top. You put your bag on a cart at the gate 10 minutes before departure, handed the ticket to the gate agent, and walked on the plane. Some would do as I often did, because planes were normally only half full: Drive to CPH, park my car, walk up to the SAS ticket counter 15 minutes before departure, ask for a hand written ticket, tell them to mail the invoice to my company, step on the plane, game over.Īt least for domestic travel there wasn't anything like "check-in". The airlines would give the travel agency a rebate between 5 and 10% for the service. The travel agency would use their experience, and printed timetables, to find out, then send telexes to the airline, later mail tickets to the customer. They would call the local travel agency and tell them the travel requirements. Passengers would normally not bother so much with which airline or flight to use. But that wasn't the norm among the many more smaller airlines.ĩ0% was business travel. This topic is quite interesting because (as already mentioned by other posters) a few of the world's largest airlines at that time were real pioneers in data communication. Almost as efficient as email today, but slightly more staff intensive. At the receiving site a picolo would immediately deliver the message to the receiver. Then call a picolo to come and pick it up and deliver it to the telex department. When I had a message to half way around the globe, then I would write it on a sheet of paper, a telex draft. In my company in pre-email times we had a "telex department" doing the hard work. As second step you would "call" the receiving telex machine and send the message using a punched tape reader. Sending a telex you would manually type the message on the typewriter, and it would punch holes in a "punched tape", a paper roll about one inch wide. It was an electric typewriter which could write on a roll of paper from signals received on a telephone line. The central registration was manual while the communication was mostly by telex.īorn in the 60'es you may, or may not, have seen a telex machine. Quoting russellnor ( Thread starter): Question.how did airlines of the 40' thru late 60's era handle reservations before computer systems?īasically the same way as the computers do it today.
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