Galileo PNR Converter Guide

Galileo, part of the Travelport group alongside Worldspan, is still the primary GDS for a large share of agencies across Europe, the UK, and parts of Asia. If you've been handed a raw Galileo PNR and need to turn it into something a client can actually read, this guide breaks down the format line by line.

Where Galileo Sits in the GDS Landscape

Galileo was developed by a consortium of European and North American airlines in the late 1980s and is now owned by Travelport, the same parent company as Worldspan and Apollo. Despite the shared ownership, Galileo retains its own booking syntax and PNR display conventions — an agent trained purely on Amadeus or Sabre will find some details unfamiliar at first glance.

Reading a Galileo-Style PNR

Like every GDS, a Galileo PNR is built from numbered passenger and segment lines. The segment line format looks like this:

1.SHAH/OMAR MR
2 BA 106 Y 12OCT 1 LHRJFK HK1 1105 1410 E
3 BA 178 Y 19OCT 1 JFKLHR HK1 1830 0630 20OCT E

Breaking Down the Segment Line

Where Galileo Formatting Differs From Amadeus and Sabre

The building blocks are the same — airline, flight number, class, date, route, status, times — but Galileo agents commonly encounter a few quirks worth knowing:

• City/airport encoding commands differ. Galileo uses DAC/ and DAN/ for decode/encode rather than Amadeus's DAN alone or Sabre's W/ prefix.
• Fare display syntax (FQD) looks similar to Amadeus on the surface but the underlying fare rule display can be formatted differently.
• Overnight arrivals are marked the same way as other GDS platforms — an explicit next-day date appears after the arrival time, as shown in the second segment above (0630 arrival, 20OCT date).

Common Galileo PNR Reading Mistakes

The most frequent errors agents make when reading Galileo PNRs by hand:

1. Misreading the day-of-week digit as part of the date — it's a separate single-digit weekday marker, not part of the date string.
2. Missing the arrival-date rollover on overnight segments, leading to an incorrect layover calculation for the next connection.
3. Confusing the booking class letter with the cabin — a single letter like Y, H, or Q indicates the fare class, not necessarily the cabin of service, and the mapping between letters and cabins varies by airline.

Galileo/Focalpoint Terminal Quirks That Catch Agents Off Guard

Like Sabre, Galileo can be accessed through more than one interface — the classic command-line "Galileo Desktop" terminal and the graphical Focalpoint workspace built on top of it. Copying a PNR from a Focalpoint window sometimes introduces extra line breaks around each segment or strips the fixed-width spacing the raw terminal uses, because the graphical view re-renders the data rather than displaying it verbatim. When something that looked fine on screen pastes messily into a text field, this re-rendering is usually why — pulling from the plain command-line display avoids the problem.

Galileo's fare display command, FQD, and its pricing command, FXP, look similar to their Amadeus counterparts on the surface, but the underlying fare rule text they return is formatted differently — enough that a screen-scraping tool built for one won't reliably parse the other, even though both are labeled "fare quote."

Galileo vs. Amadeus vs. Sabre: The Same Segment, Three Ways

SSRs, OSI Lines, and Multi-Passenger Galileo PNRs

Once a Galileo booking grows beyond a single traveler, the passenger block and the special-request lines beneath the segments expand the same way they do on other GDS platforms:

1.SHAH/OMAR MR  2.SHAH/LEILA MRS
2 BA 106 Y 12OCT 1 LHRJFK HK2 1105 1410 E
3 SSR VGML BA HK1 12OCT LHRJFK/P2
4 OSI BA FQTV BA123456/P1

The segment status (HK2) still covers both travelers together, and the SSR/OSI lines reference the individual passenger via a number after the slash — the same pattern used in Amadeus and Sabre, since SSR and OSI codes are an IATA-wide standard rather than something each GDS invented independently. What changes between systems is only the surrounding punctuation, not the underlying meaning of VGML (vegetarian meal), FQTV (frequent flyer number), or any other standard code.

Common Copy-Paste Mistakes From the Galileo Terminal

• Copying from Focalpoint's rendered view instead of the raw command-line display, which can silently reformat spacing as described above.
• Confusing an FQD fare quote screen for the PNR itself — the two displays can look alike to someone unfamiliar with Galileo, but only one contains bookable segment data.
• Dropping the day-of-week digit when a narrow terminal window causes the line to reflow, which shifts the remaining columns out of position.
• Pasting only part of a long multi-segment itinerary when the PNR display spans more than one screen in the classic terminal.

Status Codes Beyond HK: What Else You Might See

Most Galileo PNRs you'll handle show a clean HK for a confirmed segment. Occasionally you'll run into other two-letter codes, which follow the same convention across every GDS:

Seeing anything other than a plain HK is usually a sign that something changed after the segment was first booked — a waitlist clearing, an airline-initiated schedule change, or a reconfirmation — and it's worth double-checking the booking before sending a client an itinerary built on it.

ARNK Segments and Split PNRs in Galileo

Galileo uses the same ARNK convention as the rest of the industry to mark a surface gap between two flight segments — a sector with no airline, flight number, or status that a converter needs to recognize rather than treat as an error.

2 BA 106 Y 12OCT 1 LHRJFK HK1 1105 1410 E
3 ARNK
4 AF 1780 Y 18OCT 3 CDGLHR HK1 1830 1905 E

Galileo bookings can also be split the same way Amadeus and Sabre PNRs can — when part of a group cancels, reroutes, or is ticketed separately from the rest, Travelport creates a new locator for that portion. If an itinerary you're converting seems to be missing a passenger who you know was originally on the booking, check whether the PNR was split before assuming the converter dropped something.

Troubleshooting a Galileo PNR That Won't Convert Cleanly