New agent looking for a way to book air reliably
Hello all and thank you in advance for the advice. I am new to the travel industry, but purchased an established brick and mortar agency so I'm having to jump right in and support incoming clients. The old owner has been an absolute nightmare to work with and has been booking flights through a GDS (Travelport Smartpoint - Apollo) for 40 years. I have had her ARC and IATA accreditations transferred to me, but I am far from prepared to take on the GDS without lots and lots of training which she is failing to provide. Travelport has also thrown a curve ball and given me to the end of the year to switch languages from Apollo to Galileo and I am losing all the progress I started on learning Apollo which is all the old owner knew and can teach me. I am desperately seeking alternative solutions because I need to become independent from the old owner as soon as possible, but I feel trapped because air is one of the most commonly booked pieces of travel in my office and also the most suffocatingly difficult to learn and manage.
I have looked into platform options like Centrav and Globetrotter by FareLadder, but I have no idea if these are actually viable alternatives to learning the GDS system and I don't want to commit to a system that I will have to use to manage bookings after I make them if it's not something I want to fully transition to. I am seeking any and all suggestions and advice for how I should do air bookings. Thank you!
(Also before passing judgement on my situation, I would like to add that I am very aware that this was a major jump as someone just starting out, but I am eager to learn and was honestly grossly misled by the owner about how difficult this would be. She is a pathological liar and refused to train me until the purchase of the business was complete and I am still paying her for her time spent training and managing these flight bookings. If she had been honest about the process and the amount of training required, I would have joined a host agency first to learn and get my bearings before taking this on. I am just trying to stop the financial bleeding from employing her to train me at this point and looking for any way to get by without her.)
TL;DR New agent struggling to learn GDS, looking for solid and reliable alternatives for making air bookings asap