THE CHALLENGE THAT KEEPS CTOS UP AT NIGHT
Migrating automated ticketing workflows off legacy infrastructure is one of the highest-risk modernisation programmes in travel technology. The stakes are immediate: a ticketing failure in a live booking environment means revenue leakage, agent escalations, and customer impact — all at once.
For a global multi-billion dollar travel enterprise running ticketing automation across Amadeus, Travelport, and Southwest Airlines simultaneously, the challenge was to move off legacy systems without disrupting the revenue stream that depended on them. Every PNR in the queue represented money. Every failure had a cost.
The question was never whether to modernise. It was whether the partner understood the domain well enough to do it without the operation noticing.
THE ENGINEERING APPROACH
Intelligent Auto-Ticketing Engine
Built from the ground up to handle the full complexity of production ticketing — not just the standard case, but the edge cases where legacy systems were failing silently.
Re-verifies fares before ticketing — catching price changes that would create financial exposure
Applies correct forms of payment dynamically based on booking and client configuration
Handles dynamic tour code logic and commission calculation without manual input
Synchronises booking data with back-office accounting systems in real time — not via batch
Routes failures into structured recovery queues with diagnostic context for agent resolution
Readback, Cancellation & Void Automation
Manually-ticketed PNRs, cancellations, and modifications create data integrity gaps when reservation platforms and GDS systems diverge. Trabacus built automated Readback, Cancellation, and Void services across all three GDS environments, ensuring that every transaction — regardless of how it originated — was consistently reflected across all systems.
THE OUTCOME
The Challenge
Legacy ticketing infrastructure creating failure modes that required manual intervention
Reconciliation gaps between GDS data and back-office accounting
Manually-ticketed PNRs creating data inconsistencies across systems
Queue management not built for NDC-specific failure modes
What Changed
Legacy ticketing infrastructure creating failure modes that required manual intervention
Reconciliation gaps between GDS data and back-office accounting
Manually-ticketed PNRs creating data inconsistencies across systems
Queue management not built for NDC-specific failure modes
The migration completed without operational disruption to live revenue environments. The engagement ran for over three years, evolving from a migration project into a sustained engineering partnership.