airline-bookings

Well they aren’t really that new. But Sabre deactivated the old web service URLs and sent out the new list labelled as

CERT, TSTS, DEV & PROD.

Now if any average developer looked at this list, they would assume that DEV was meant for them, CERT for certification, TSTS for testing and PROD for live production use. Looks like our supplier/developer forgot to RTFM where it states that DEV actually creates live bookings with the airlines.

And in the process of testing our new booking engine, in two days Mr. John Doe made some 85 live bookings and a lot of it flying first class (KWD 3,000/- tickets). :)  I got the shock of my life when our operations team called up inquiring about the bookings. Seems one of the airlines called up. We probably blocked their entire first class quota travelling to London during this peak December period. :(

If we hadn’t caught this mistake in time, it could have been the most expensive development disaster in the Online Booking Engine business. Now that’s what I call a near miss. ;)