The four major European airlines coming together to create a shared reservation system under the Amadeus name, have decided to take a licence to the reservation software used in the SystemOne reservation service owned and operated by Texas Air Corp over the rival Sabre system operated by American Airlines. IBM has been awarded a contract worth more than $100m for the hardware on which the SystemOne software will run. The four airlines – Air France, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines System, Iberia, have also agreed to list Texas Air flights – it owns Eastern, Continental, People Express – in their existing Unisys 1100-based reservation systems and SystemOne will carry their flights; further co-operation is planned as Amadeus is introduced. A rival pan-European system, also to use IBM hardware, is planned by a consortium led by British Airways using United Air’s Apollo software.
