#ThrowbackThursday with Louise Gardiner, CWT

Back in the day when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, computers were the size of a refrigerator and BSP was settled through a courier delivery to Winnipeg (don't miss a deadline because three strikes and you're out!), I began my career in the travel industry. 

The most innovative equipment in the office was a telephone, a calculator and a receipt box that held invoices duplicated through carbon copies. All travel was booked over the telephone and airline tariffs arrived via Alltours with pages that had to be replaced by hand in order to ensure quality assurance of data. Such a simple time, such a profitable time for local brick and mortar agencies when most tickets were hand-issued and hand-delivered. 

Back in the day, upgrades were done via phone 24 hours prior to departure and our counsellors kept notes on their cigarette packages to ensure Sunday upgrades were not missed for Monday travel. Most travel was FIT and counsellors had a full week to book and issue tickets with no worries if you missed something - tickets could be voided or back dated as long as that BSP report went out on time!

Fast-forward through Reservac to the early Sabre days when the blue screen was all we knew and the server screen faced the wall but nobody in the agency was allowed to touch it unless you called Sabre for specific directions on rebooting. Our little individual receipt boxes were replaced with booking forms that were hand-filled with all the flight details of the tickets and then couriered to the accounting department to be entered for automatic ticket issuance every night. 

With no cellphones or e-mail, these files were hand-entered by our trusty accounting manager in a computer system that generated these computerized tickets and invoices. The floppy disks were numerous and the size of LP records and syntax errors were plenty. I was in my 20s and managed a $10 million three-branch agency through the process. Ah, those were the days! The days of ‘Saturday Night Live’ when I needed to give my whereabouts for tech support. Many a night I walked us through the system errors by issuing voice commands like "control alt F5" to the sound of Belushi, Murray and Aykroyd yelling, "Cheezborger! Cheezborger! You want doublecheez?!?"

And then miracles of miracles, Trams came to town, 3 1/2 inch disks were invented (34 of them at five minutes each to back up the system to be precise), then the one stop tape backup and Sabre For Windows. E-mail replaced Telex messages or faxes and overnight manual file entry became an automated daily sync. Saturday Night Live lived on but without a syntax error in sight. The Sabre server screen was no longer facing the wall and I was allowed to restart the server on my own by using a mouse...now that was innovation!

Next up? The WAN - the wide area network! - complete with ISDN lines, a Sabre server box, IP addresses and a hefty price tag to support. But guess what....no more driving around town to pick up branch files, no more BSP courier....all tickets and packages seamlessly booked, entered by counsellors into the GDS and interfaced to the back office...all online...with BSP pulled and reported without an adding machine tape... B2B at its best!

Just like Saturday Night Live, over time we move on; same show, different cast.

Enter agencies specializing in online travel where consumers can self-book, vertical integration where suppliers and retailer relationships blend, B2B and B2C websites for every product imaginable from air tickets to cruises. Cellphones, e-mail, fiber optic bandwidths, VOIP, flash drives (that can do a back up in seconds), social media, at-home workers, the cloud - you name it, we have it!

Back in the day when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and I began my career in the travel industry, clients booked travel through us and explored the world. Now, in the age of innovation, they do the same. I guess a Cheezborger will always be a Cheezborger!