← Articles

Amadeus vs Sabre vs Galileo vs Worldspan: reading each GDS format

Four systems, one booking, four ways of showing it. Here's how to recognise which GDS produced a screen and what actually changes from one to the next.

Almost every airline booking in the world passes through one of four Global Distribution Systems: Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport Galileo (often used through Smartpoint) and Worldspan (also a Travelport system). They all store the same underlying facts — who is travelling, on which flights, in which class, at what status — but each one lays that information out on screen with its own spacing, ordering and shorthand. If you move between agencies, or read itineraries forwarded from different sources, being able to tell them apart at a glance saves real time.

The one line they (almost) agree on

The air segment is the most standardised part of a PNR. Across all four systems it packs the same fields into a single dense line: a line number, the carrier and flight number, a booking-class letter, the departure date, a day-of-week digit, the origin and destination airports run together, a status code with passenger count, and the departure and arrival times. Here is a typical segment as Amadeus or Sabre would show it:

The field-by-field breakdown of that line is covered in its own article. What matters here is that the shape of it is consistent enough that PNRpro — and your own eye — can read a segment from any of these systems using the same mental template.

How to tell them apart

Amadeus

Amadeus is the most common system outside North America. Its retrieved-booking screens tend to lead with the record locator and a numbered list of passengers, then numbered segments. Times are shown in the 24-hour clock. Entries a consultant types are terse and start with letters like RT (retrieve), SR (special service request) and FXP (price). When you see 24-hour times and SR DOCS-style service lines, you are usually looking at Amadeus or Sabre.

Sabre

Sabre dominates in North America. It looks very similar to Amadeus at the segment level — same 24-hour times, same city-pair-run-together convention — but its command language differs (a Sabre agent sells with entries beginning 0 and prices with WP). Special service requests are prefixed 3, so a passport entry reads 3DOCS… rather than Amadeus's SR DOCS…. At the level most consultants read an itinerary, Amadeus and Sabre are close cousins.

Galileo / Travelport (Smartpoint)

Galileo, usually accessed today through the Smartpoint interface, is the classic Travelport system. Its service-information entries are prefixed SI.SSR, and its passenger association uses a P number (/P1, /P2). Galileo segments still follow the shared one-line template, so the giveaway is usually in the surrounding entries rather than the segment itself.

Worldspan

Worldspan, the other Travelport platform, is the one most likely to surprise you: it commonly displays flight times using a 12-hour clock with an A or P suffix — 815A for 08:15, 125P for 13:25 — rather than the 24-hour 0815 / 1325 the others use. If you paste a booking and the times end in A or P, it is almost certainly Worldspan-style output. (PNRpro detects this automatically and normalises those times to the 24-hour clock for you.)

What changes beyond the segment

The differences widen once you leave the flight lines. Fare quotes, ticketing masks, baggage-allowance displays and special-service formats each have their own syntax per system. A passport/DOCS entry, for example, is written three different ways for the three main hosts — which is exactly why a tool that outputs all three side by side is useful. But the itinerary a traveller actually cares about — who flies where, when, in what cabin — lives in that shared segment line, and that is what makes cross-system reading learnable.

Why this matters for a clean quote

When you forward an itinerary to a client, they should never see raw GDS shorthand — the record locator format, the status codes, the run-together city pairs. Recognising the source system is the first step; the second is translating it into something a traveller reads without a manual. That translation — decode, price, brand, send — is the whole point of PNRpro.