Galileo (CRS)
The computer reservation system (CRS) Galileo is a booking portal for the tourism industry .
In 1971 United Airlines initiated the Apollo CRS system , which made it possible to make computer-aided bookings of flights and seat reservations initially for their own sales offices. From 1976 this system was sold to travel agencies in North America and Japan under the name Apollo Travel Services (ATS).
In 1987, Galileo Company Ltd was founded in Swindon , Great Britain, by the shareholders British Airways , Swissair , KLM Royal Dutch Airlines , Alitalia and Covia (formerly Apollo Travel Services).
In 1997, Galileo International Corporation went public on the New York Stock Exchange . From October 2001 to September 2006 the Cendant Corporation was the sole shareholder and Galileo was an important member of the Cendant Travel Distribution Services, in which the tourism activities of the Cendant Corporation were bundled. After the Cendant Corporation was split up into four independent companies in 2006, the TDS division was sold to the financial investor Blackstone Group and has operated under the name Travelport ever since . After approval by the antitrust authorities in the USA and the EU, Travelport took over the Galileo competitor Worldspan on August 21, 2007 and started to merge the two reservation systems.
Galileo carries the IATA airline code 1G , the Apollo system 1V , which continues to operate in parallel .
Worldwide, 43,500 travel agencies work with the reservation system and can use it to access tariffs and availabilities from over 460 airlines, 23 car rental companies, 58,000 hotels and 430 tour operators.
The German branch was founded in 1989 in Frankfurt am Main and currently looks after around 900 customers with 21 employees.