PIA’s Online Ticketing System Affected Sales Due To Technical Fault

It has been reported that today, PIA’s online reservation and ticketing system named Sabre was down due to technical fault, the overall online sales were also dropped due to this problem.

PIA’s spokesperson Mashood Tajwar told reuters that “PIA now has restored the manual and other online booking systems”. However, blockage in ticketing system has not affected the flight operations as online tickets are normally sold days, weeks or even months before the actual flight’s departure.”

He further argued that if the problem would have occurred for about two to three days then it would definitely affect the flight operations largely.

He confirmed that the problem was in the software itself, Sabre is a U.S. based global online ticketing and reservation system, which affected the flights across the globe using the same system, the technical fault at the supplier’s end and not at the PIA’s management.

“The airlines offer keep more than one reservation system for contingency planning. Airlines using Sabre would have moved to other online ticketing systems” said the spokesperson.

There are many other online ticket reservation systems other than Sabre including, Abacus, Apollo, GDS, Amadeus and Galileo.

PIA has been incurring losses since last 6 months or more, 7.3 per cent of loss totaled Rs282.20 billion in the last six-month period ended June, 2016 as it continued to fly in losses on many international routes and lose domestic business.