Sabre logo (Photo courtesy of Sabre)
Sabre provides a technology marketplace for the travel ecosystem, connecting suppliers and travel agents across the travel industry.
The company has signed an exclusive 10-year partnership with Google to deliver all of its travel agent shopping experiences on the Google Cloud environment.
Travel technology will continue to evolve even as we emerge from the pandemic, and Sabre's new initiative reflects this, providing travel advisors with tools to help them grow their business, says Todd Arthur, North American agent, managing director, Americas distribution and global corporate solutions, for Sabre Travel Solutions.
“That's what Sabre is doing with its partnership with Google, bringing efficiency tools to help travel agents do the retail and fulfillment part of travel,” Arthur said in a recent interview with TravelPulse at the 2024 Travel Advisor Conference. “It's really a complete end-to-end product.”
Todd Arthur, Managing Director, Americas Distribution and Global Corporate Solutions, North American Representative for Sabre Travel Solutions (Photo courtesy of Sabre)
Chinmayi Sharma, global head of accommodation, land and sea at Sabre Travel Solutions, echoed similar sentiments.
“Business is growing well,” Sharma said. “The hotel business in particular has seen double-digit growth over the past few months. Internally, we're working with all our supply partners to ensure all our APIs are up to date and that we have the best content we can provide to our travel advisors. On the travel agency side, we continue to enhance our APIs and platform capabilities. One interesting initiative that we've been working on for the past few years, which falls under the lodging AI category, is our partnership with Google. We're developing a number of tools with Google, but essentially, Google is helping improve workflow for travel advisors, increase hotel attach rates, and grow e-commerce on the platform. So, most of our major initiatives are either ensuring better content and upgrading our APIs or tweaking our retail capabilities with our agency partners.”
Chinmayi Sharma Global Head – Accommodation, Land and Sea Sabre Travel Solutions (Photo credit: Sabre)
New Innovations
“One of the things we've launched recently is Sabre Mosaic, which is really about enabling our airline partners to do retail in a modern, efficient way,” Arthur said. “It's best-in-class technology, and our airline partners can deliver offers, orders and fulfillment through Sabre Mosaic, so we're really excited to have that launched.”
Saber Mosaic leverages Google's industry-leading AI capabilities.
“Defining and building the next generation of airline retail solutions is a significant investment and strategic priority for Sabre, and we are well on our way along this path,” Sabre president and CEO Kurt Eckert said in the release. “SabreMosaic marks the culmination of our commitment to innovating in airline IT and actively collaborating with airline partners to deliver the future of modern retail. Building on the success we've already seen with Sabre's Retail Intelligence solution suite, today's announcement marks an important milestone in our journey toward delivering a fully open, modern and flexible retail platform.”
Earlier this year, Sabre partnered with Internova Travel Group, the world's largest travel services company, to release the new Sabre Red Launchpad tool.
Sabre Red Launchpad Hotel Search (Photo credit: Sabre)
It's an extension of Sabre Red 360 and is designed to reduce training time for travel consultants new to the industry.
“One of the things we've done with Red Launchpad is create a very easy-to-use graphical interface tool that allows anyone, with very little training, to be very efficient at shopping, booking and executing leisure or corporate travel,” Arthur says.[It’s] “It's a best-in-class user interface, consumer grade, similar to what you would experience while shopping on any kind of website at home, but very efficiently addresses all the mid-back office tools, reporting and other needs that a travel agent has. Sabre Red Launchpad is point-and-click, very easy to train, very easy to execute and perform basic transactions. So we're very excited about it.”
It’s all about working smarter, not harder, and making it easier for new people to get started in the travel industry.
“The initial feedback has been very good,” says Sharma. “The tool has all the functionality to book most of the major requirements, and we are confident that the adoption and penetration of this tool will only increase in the future because the travel advisor industry is experiencing a major change in terms of demographics and talent entering the workforce. Launchpad is one of our efforts to make it easy for anyone to use, so the learning curve is much shorter. It also provides new capabilities for selling products on the web. This is a new era, so merchandising and display capabilities have improved significantly, and retail capabilities are only going to get better.”
Sabre Red Launchpad Aerial Search (Photo Credit: Sabre)
Message to Travel Advisor
Finally, we asked both Arthur and Sharma what message they would like to convey to the travel advisor community.
“If you haven't seen Sabre in a while or you don't know about Sabre, I urge you to come and see Sabre, get involved with the events that we're at and what we're doing on Sabre.com where you'll find a ton of information,” Arthur said. “Partnering with Google was really a game changer for retailers in terms of driving additional revenue from transactions, so we're really investing in our technology platform and we're really excited about what artificial intelligence can bring to the travel industry, making travel really fun and easy.”
“We love the travel advisor community first and foremost,” says Sharma. “We've been in this business since 1964 and we intend to be there for a long time to come. As a travel platform, we will continue to provide relevant content to our travel advisor partners and invest heavily in our products and technology with the travel advisor in mind. How do we remove friction from their workflow? How do we give them back their time so they can spend quality time with their travelers? With the advent of ML and AI, these tools and adoption rates will only continue to grow. We are here to serve the travel advisor community and we intend to continue to engage.”
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