Seventy years ago, a travel advisor was also a human calculator, a currency converter, a routing engineer, and a safe-keeper of paper tickets worth real money. Here’s how the industry – and the people at its heart – changed beyond recognition. And why the most important thing never did.
There is a photograph that makes people stop.
A travel advisor’s desk, circa 1985. No laptop. No screens. Just towers of thick, phonebook-sized directories. These were the infamous OAG binders, the Official Airline Guide, one volume per world region, stacked alongside a tickler box the size of a filing cabinet, a tray of paper tickets locked in a safe each evening, and somewhere in the middle of it all, a human being who knew how to find a fare across four continents.
That was the job.
When ASATA was founded in 1956 as the first formal body to represent Southern African travel advisors, the OAG had already been published for 27 years. Every flight schedule, every fare rule, every routing restriction for every airline on earth was in those binders – micro-printed, meticulously organised, and entirely the advisor’s responsibility to navigate.
No system double-checked your work. No algorithm guaranteed the fare. You built it by hand, calculated the mileage manually against IATA’s Neutral Unit of Construction, and crossed your fingers that the numbers came out right. If they didn’t, you found out weeks later when an Agency Debit Memo arrived, the airline clawing back money for a comma in the wrong place.
“I used to wake up in the middle of the night. Oh god. I worked this out incorrectly.”
That’s Mary Reynolds, a stalwart of the Southern African travel industry, describing what it felt like to carry the responsibility of a complex fare calculation home with you. She is not exaggerating. Pre-GDS, the job was technically demanding in a way that is genuinely difficult to convey to anyone who entered the industry after the screens arrived.
The Tuesday midnight ritual
Before the GDS, there was Tuesday midnight.
The IATA exchange rate changed weekly. Whatever rate you had been working with was the rate, so advisors issued tickets right up to the deadline, sometimes with their coats on, watching the clock. Issue before midnight: the fare was locked. Issue after: the rate had changed, and you either lost money or gained it. Either way, your client’s fare was different.
“We would work right up until midnight issuing tickets at that same exchange rate. We were either going to backdate or wait for the next day.”
That was just Tuesdays. The rest of the week involved managing physical supplies of blank paper tickets – which carried real cash value and had to be kept in heavy office safes – compiling manual sales logs, and posting individual settlement cheques to dozens of different airlines at the end of each billing cycle.
The screens arrive — and the game changes
ASATA was 20 years old when the first SABRE terminal appeared in a travel agency in May 1976. American Airlines and IBM had been developing the system since 1957; it had launched as the world’s first fully operational Computer Reservation System in 1964. But travel advisors didn’t see a terminal until a decade after that, and even then, those early systems only allowed bookings on the owning airline’s flights.
By 1987, nine European airlines had formed the Galileo GDS consortium. That same year, Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, and SAS founded Amadeus. The GDS wars were on. By 1992, Galileo Southern Africa was operating under South African Airways – the Safari terminals, as they were known locally – and the industry’s infrastructure was transforming.
The binders didn’t disappear overnight. But the midnight countdown was finally behind them.
“The first thing — I could get a good night’s sleep.”
That is Mary Reynolds again, on what the GDS era meant in practice. It sounds small. It wasn’t.
The floor falls out: zero commission
Just as advisors found their footing on the new systems, the business model shifted beneath them.
On 9 February 1995, Delta Air Lines cut its travel advisor commission from 10% to 5%, with a ceiling of $50 per round trip. American, United, Northwest, and US Airways all followed within hours. In September 1997, the rate dropped again – to 8%, with an estimated $600–900 million in industry-wide advisor revenue lost in a single move. By March 2002, eight of the ten largest US airlines had eliminated base commission entirely.
Zero. The airline commission that had underpinned the agency model for decades was gone.
In South Africa, the story played out differently but no less dramatically. SAA restructured its override commission scheme in 1999, reducing base commission from 9% to 7% while engineering bonus thresholds that – as the SA Competition Tribunal later found – were designed to steer advisors away from competitor airlines. It cost SAA R100 million in fines, paid in two tranches in 2005 and 2006.
The advisors who survived both shifts did so the same way: by charging for their expertise rather than depending on airline generosity. Service fees became the norm. The advisor who once earned a percentage of every ticket now had to articulate, to every client, why their knowledge was worth paying for.
Many did. The ones who stayed understood something the OAG era had forged but never needed to name: that knowing what you are doing is not a commodity. ASATA was at every table during this period, advocating for fair terms, professional standards, and the recognition that travel advisors are not simply order takers.
The paper disappears
E-ticketing entered the world through a Utah-based low-cost carrier called Morris Air in 1993, was scaled by Southwest Airlines, and became mandatory industry-wide on 1 June 2008, when IATA’s 100% e-ticketing mandate came into force. Paper tickets could no longer be issued on BSP neutral stock. The industry saved an estimated USD 3 billion annually as a result.
The carbonised coupons. The inter-office safe. The end-of-cycle bundle posted to the airline. All of it, done.
In December 2025, OAG retired its last printed flight guide after nearly 97 years in print. The binders that once defined the travel advisor’s workspace — that Mary Reynolds once hauled to her brother-in-law’s house to help plan his 16-flight round-the-world trip — exist now only in archives and in the memories of those who used them.
The next reckoning: NDC
If the commission cuts were the first existential test and the internet was the second, the New Distribution Capability – NDC – is the third.
In October 2012, IATA adopted Resolution 787, establishing NDC as a new XML-based standard to replace the 1960s EDIFACT system underlying every GDS. The idea was straightforward: allow airlines to sell rich content, bundles, seat upgrades, and ancillaries through any channel, directly, without the GDS acting as intermediary.
The first official NDC standards were published in September 2015. That same month, Lufthansa introduced a €16 surcharge per segment for tickets booked through traditional GDS channels. NDC stopped being a technology question and became a financial one.
By 2021, American Airlines was restricting its GDS content, making full fare access available only through NDC connections. Advisors without NDC capability could not see all available fares. The industry pushed back hard, and some restrictions were partially reversed. But the direction was unmistakable.
NDC is not arriving. It is here. And the debate about whether it represents an opportunity – richer content, ancillary access, more personalised offers – or a threat – fragmented workflows, multiple connections, platform complexity – is live across the Southern African travel trade right now.
It is the same conversation the industry has had at every inflection point for seventy years. The tools change. The question stays the same: how do travel professionals protect their value, serve their clients well, and ensure they are not cut out of a distribution model being redesigned around them?
ASATA’s answer has not changed either. Represent. Advocate. Ensure no member stands alone when the rules shift.
What does not change
The desk looks different now. Three screens, a laptop, a phone. No binders. No tickler box. No safe behind the reception desk holding tickets worth as much as cash.
But the expertise that desk represents – built across decades of mileage ladders, NUC calculations, midnight exchange rate countdowns, and every ADM that arrived without warning – is still there. It moved from the binder to the screen. It survived deregulation, the internet, zero commission, and the GDS wars.
It will navigate NDC too.
That is what seventy years looks like from the inside. Not the tools. Not the technology. The people who understood the job well enough to keep doing it, no matter what the industry threw at them.
The good old days made us who we are.
