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
| Element | Example | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Airline + Flight | BA 106 | British Airways flight 106 |
| Booking Class | Y | Full-fare economy |
| Date | 12OCT | 12th of October |
| Day-of-Week | 1 | Numeric weekday marker (1=Monday) |
| Route | LHRJFK | London Heathrow to New York JFK |
| Status | HK1 | Confirmed, 1 seat |
| Times | 1105 1410 | Departs 11:05, arrives 14:10 local |
| Action Code | E | Electronic ticket indicator |
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/andDAN/for decode/encode rather than Amadeus'sDANalone or Sabre'sW/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).
Once a Galileo PNR is stripped down to its core segment data (airline, flight, route, times, dates), it reads identically to a PNR from any other GDS. A converter that recognises Galileo's specific line pattern can turn it into the same clean itinerary format regardless of source system — which is exactly what a GDS-agnostic converter is for.
Common Galileo PNR Reading Mistakes
The most frequent errors agents make when reading Galileo PNRs by hand:
- 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.
- Missing the arrival-date rollover on overnight segments, leading to an incorrect layover calculation for the next connection.
- Confusing the booking class letter with the cabin — a single letter like
Y,H, orQindicates the fare class, not necessarily the cabin of service, and the mapping between letters and cabins varies by airline.
Convert a Galileo PNR in Seconds
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