The e-commerce revolution of the 1990s brought about a breakthrough in business and a deep and lasting transformation in the way consumers research, shop and buy. From music to mortgages, discount toys to high-end electronics, just about anything and everything is available for purchase online.
Most people associate the birth of electronic travel distribution with the advent of the Internet and the explosion in e-commerce in the late 1990s.
But in fact, electronic commerce in travel pre-dates the "dot-com" boom by some three decades and had become quite commonplace by the mid-1980s.
The technology systems powering electronic travel commerce were then referred to as CRSs, or computerized reservation systems.
They were the predecessors of today's global distribution systems, or GDSs.
The GDSs have traveled far in the past four-plus decades. The three major GDS companies today power the critical reservations and technology infrastructure of over 163,000 travel agency locations and enable bookings by nearly half a million travel agents around the globe.
The GDSs generated more than $9.6 billion in revenue and more than 1.1 billion transactions in 2008. That equates to just over 2,100 transactions per minute.

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