Dubai: Emirates, Etihad Airways and Gulf Air experienced delays on Tuesday morning after their passenger check-in and reservation system crashed.
The passenger check-in and reservation system, designed by Sabre, experienced a worldwide outage at around 8am local time and lasted for two hours.
Sabre software is used by more than 300 airlines around the world and some 100 airports worldwide were affected by the outage. Sabre is commonly used among international airlines, including Virgin Australia, United Airlines and American Airlines.
A spokeswoman for Bahrain carrier Gulf Air said the airline’s booking reservation system and passenger check-in services “experienced technical difficulties” on Tuesday, resulting in some delay.
The airline said it was able to minimise delays by manually checking in passengers until the two systems came on. Gulf Air said the two affected systems were offline for two hours.
“Seven flights were affected, with delays ranging from 12 minutes to just over an hour,” the Gulf Air spokeswoman said.
Booking glitches
Customers were also unable to book tickets online on Gulf Air with the outage also impacting the airline’s online reservation system.
The spokeswoman said the airline received increasing calls from customers trying to book tickets “due to the airline’s main reservations system being offline.”
Gulf Air was able to contact affected reservations after the system came back online.
Etihad Airways released a statement on its website on Tuesday morning that said the airline was experiencing some delays as a result of a reservation and check-in system failure that “affected many other airlines.”
“Sabre is experiencing a system issue,” Sabre said in a tweet shortly after the crash brought check-in systems worldwide to a grinding halt. “Our technology team is working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation.”
Manual check-in
Australian media reported that Etihad was operating a manual check-in for flights on its network.
In addition, Sabre is used by major third-party online travel search and ticketing portals, including Travelocity. Budget carrier JetBlue and the giant American Airlines flight network were also impacted by the computer glitch.
Virgin Australia, a code-share partner of Etihad, was also reported to have been manually checking in passengers.-Gulf News
