Technicians at Sabre are looking for the cause of a failure of the SynXis reservation system this week, paralysing 10,000 hotels from taking bookings via the GDS.
Problems are said to have officially emerged in the early hours of Wednesday this week when the SynXis Central Reservation System broke down, hitting bookings made via the GDS, as well as some online booking engines and online travel agencies.
The fault continued for at least 24 hours (comments from customers complaining on Twitter actually puts it closer to 30) before systems returned to normal.
Despite the breakdown, hotels were still able to make reservations using their own property management systems received directly or via call centres.
The reason for the problem is, however, still apparently completely unknown.
An official says:
"The unexpected systems issue with the SynXis Central Reservations System has since been resolved and our customers are now able to access the system.
"This is an extremely rare occurrence and we regret any inconvenience to our customers and their guests. We are working now to determine the cause of issue, and will take all necessary actions to prevent this from happening again."
SynXis is a completely web-based service, connecting around 10,000 hotels to the Sabre GDS (and, in turn, thousands of offline agents and OTAs). It also allows hotels to manage their own availability, rates and content flowing through the system.