40 Years Ago, This Travel Agent Changed The Business

Jack Revel never meant to become a travel agent. Nor did he ever think he would develop a computer system that would change the travel agency industry. That system is marking its 40th anniversary this year.

Revel Travel, a Beverly Hills, CA, agency that caters to the entertainment industry, was founded in 1933 by his father, Sam, and Revel’s parents hoped he would join the family business.

He had other ideas. He went off to New York and got a degree in engineering. But he was lured back to California, enticed by the number of technology companies in the Los Angeles area.

He decided to work at his parent’s agency while he looked for an engineering job, never intending it to be permanent. “I figured I’d do it for a year,” he said. But when American Airlines introduced its Semi-Automated Business Research Environment, or Sabre, to travel agencies in 1976, Revel’s life in the travel agency and his engineering aspirations began to converge.

In those days, the reporting of agency sales to the Air Traffic Conference (the predecessor of the Airlines Reporting Corp.) was an arduous affair. Everything was manual; every week, agency managers had to sit down and add up how much they owed the airlines for fares and taxes. They went through all the copies of their tickets and tallied up the numbers on an adding machine.

The process was costly—since the system invited errors, ATC demanded that agents over-authorize the amount to be paid by about 6%. And it was time-consuming—even more so when ATC found errors, which were almost always in its favor, and most agents simply didn’t have the resources to question ATC’s findings, Revel said.

Revel was sure the solution could be unlocked from Sabre. “I knew that all the data was in the CRS,” as Sabre and its brethren were called in their pre-global days, “but you needed it to come over automatically,” he said. “I tried to do an IBM computer interface. I knew it could be done, but I had trouble making it happen.”

Revel wasn’t giving up. “I called IBM, and they connected me to a guy in Boca Raton, who connected me to someone in Atlanta,” he said.

Finally, he solved a major problem. “I knew how Sabre worked,” he said. “Sabre’s protocol allowed it to send one ticket at a time, and it expected an answer. If it didn’t get one, it would shut down.” So Revel went back to the software he had written and added a response to every 10th line of code.

Revel wasn’t thinking about marketing the system to other agencies, although a few local agents had bought it.

“Then IBM came to me and wanted to license the software,” he said, and the Retail Travel Agency Management and Accounting System was launched. It ran on Datamaster, IBM’s desktop computer for small businesses. It weighed nearly 100 pounds and had 64k of memory, and it was eventually overtaken by the PC.

Known today simply as Travcom CS, the system is used by thousands of agencies in 55 countries. Among its clients is Altour, one of the largest independently owned agencies in the U.S. and, since 2004, the parent company of Revel Travel.

It works with all western GDS platforms, and it has adapted to the new technologies of the time. Because it was designed by a travel agent, it “speaks travel agent,” Revel said; an agent doesn’t need to be a certified public accountant to use it.

Does Revel have any regrets about abandoning his engineering career? No, he said. “The travel business gets under your skin.”