US airlines booking services resume after Sabre fixes tech glitch

NEW YORK: Sabre Corp said on Monday it had fixed a technical issue that affected booking services of its U.S. airline partners such as Southwest Airlines Co, Virgin America and JetBlue Airways Corp.

Customers of these airlines were unable to book or modify existing reservations due to a temporary outage of Sabre's computer systems. A spokeswoman from Sabre said the outage of a pricing engine impacting some of its airline and travel agent customers had been resolved and the systems were back in recovery mode.

"Domestic booking functionality on Southwest.com is back up and running at this time," Southwest tweeted. Virgin America also tweeted saying they were facing a reservations system outage causing booking and check-in issues and that the problem had been resolved.

When contacted, JetBlue said the tech issue had been resolved, and customers could now book flights or change existing reservations on the website, the mobile app or over the phone. As airlines switch to electronic luggage tags and more travelers swap paper tickets for boarding passes stored on smartphones, industry consultants say the impact of technology disruptions will keep growing.

That means more money lost for airlines and more travel plans thwarted for passengers when a glitch occurs. Earlier this year, Delta Air Lines Inc canceled hundreds of flights and delayed many others after an outage hit its computer systems, grounding planes and stranding passengers of one of the world's largest carriers at airports around the globe.

As airlines switch to electronic luggage tags and more travelers swap paper tickets for boarding passes stored on smartphones, industry consultants say the impact of technology disruptions will keep growing. American Airlines Group Inc flights were delayed in April last year because of an application problem on pilots' iPads, which recently replaced paper flight manuals.