Special characters acceptable for GDS
Special characters not accepted on GDS
Follow the GDS text requirements below so there are no issues when information is sent to the GDS. Entering certain characters in any text field, such as property information or rate description, can cause undesirable results such as missing or modified information.
Most GDS restrict the use of special characters in text fields as they use these special characters in system commands. When these characters are included in text information it can be rejected or removed from processing.
The following are the GDS character limitations per 'line'.
These pertain to free text entries for things like amenity and policy descriptions. This does not include product description line lengths, or room/rate description line lengths, which can have specific line lengths set using channel parameter settings.
| GDS | Limitation |
| Amadeus (1A) | 52 |
| Sabre (AA) | 60 |
| Galileo / Apollo (UA) | 50 |
| Worldspan (1P) | 58 |
Since space can be limited in some free form text fields, it can be useful to use abbreviations were possible. Below is a list of some of the suggested abbreviations.
| Text | Abbreviation |
| Breakfast | BFST |
| Dinner | DNR |
| Television | TV |
| Air conditioning | AIRCON |
| Required | REQ |
| Cancellation | CXL |
| Credit card | CC |
| Identification | ID |
| Night | NT |
| View | VW |
| Percent | PCT |
The GDS cannot read any special characters. Please limit punctuation signs to the following:
Character Name |
Acceptable sign |
Period |
. |
Slash |
/ |
Hyphen |
- |
Descriptions sent to the GDS must only user regular letters and digits. For example, accents, monetary terms and other characters such as the ones listed in the table below should never be used.
Unacceptable sign |
Use instead |
$ or any currency symbol |
USD 3-letter currency code |
% |
PCT |
* |
Star |
@ |
at |
& |
and |
+ |
plus |
Limited punctuation signs can be used - See Special characters acceptable for GDS.