TravCom Celebrates 40 Years of Innovation

         Contacts: Kate Koziol and Mardia Cooper

Winger Marketing

(312) 494-0422

[email protected]

[email protected]

For Immediate Release

TravCom Celebrates 40 Years of Innovation

Industry Pioneer Developed First Independent Accounting Interface in 1976

Los Angeles – July 5, 2016 –TravCom, founded 40 years ago this month, manages back office accounting and client management information for travel agencies, corporations and tour operators.  “Building a software company was never the plan at the beginning,” said Jack Revel, president and founder of TravCom. “I wanted to find a way to streamline airline ticket sales reporting by using the computers at my father’s travel agency.”  That small task grew into TravCom which is now used in 55 countries worldwide and manages agencies with sales up to and over $3 Billion USD.

Computer engineering was not a career path in 1976, so Revel used his degree in electrical engineering, his experience working at his father’s agency, and his accounting skills to blaze a trail in creating the first computer interface using an IBM desktop computer.  Up until then, weekly travel agency reports of airline ticket sales were done manually, which was not only time consuming, but it required the agency to submit its sales estimates and authorize a 6% overage allowance just in case there were errors in the total amount due.  “I knew that this was an expense that could be better managed with better reporting,” explained Revel. “I fought to prove that my computer report was accurate, and Revel Travel was the first to avoid these costly overage fees.”

The early days were challenging. The systems they were working with, while they were the best on the market, did not have hard drive, had only 64K of memory, and worked off two disk drives with floppy disks that were really floppy.  One floppy contained the program and one contained the data.  To top off the limited functionality of these high-end machines, the IBM Datamaster computer that TravCom launched on was priced at $10,000 per machine.  IBM was so impressed with the outcome that to this day, TravCom is the only system that IBM has ever licensed in the travel industry.

“We were the 21st agency in the country to have the Sabre system, so we have always been early adopters,” says Revel.  “What started as an in-house solution for Revel Travel, was soon highly sought after and before we knew it was taking my 25 pound ‘portable’ Compaq computer nationwide to demonstrate TravCom software to travel agencies,” he says.  “Apple, Microsoft and TravCom all just hit the 40 year mark.  It has been a short time but with exponential growth I cannot imagine the world without computers today.”

About Travcom: 

TravCom is a global industry leader in providing quality back office solutions for the travel industry. Since 1976 TravCom products have helped clients collect and store client, marketing, sales, reservation, and financial information, and manage that information to maximize efficiency and profitability. TravCom is used worldwide for agencies of all sizes.  For more information about in the United States visit http://www.travcom.com/ or call 1-800-TravCom.  For local information and support for TravCom Canada visit http://www.travcom.ca, email them at  [email protected] or call 877-582-5146.   Local information and support TravCom in the United Kingdom is available at www.travcomuk.com or by calling 0845 388 4162.

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