Sabre Leadership Discusses What’s New, What Travel Advisors Need to Know

Sabre logo (Photo Credit: Sabre)

Sabre provides a technology marketplace for the travel ecosystem, bringing together suppliers across the industry with travel agencies.

The company signed a 10-year exclusive partnership with Google to bring all of the shopping capabilities that a travel agency would experience in the Google Cloud environment.

Travel technology continues to evolve coming out of the pandemic. Sabre’s new initiatives reflect this, bringing tools to help travel advisors grow their business says Todd Arthur, Managing Director of North America Agency, Americas Delivery & Global Corporate Solutions for Sabre Travel Solutions.

“That is what Sabre brings in our partnership with Google, bringing efficiency tools that help agencies kind of retail distribute and do the fulfillment part of travel,” Arthur said in a recent interview with TravelPulse at the 2024 Travel Advisor Conference. “It’s a really complete end to end piece.”

Todd Arthur, Managing Director North America Agency, Americas Delivery & Global Corporate Solutions for Sabre Travel Solutions (Photo Credit: Sabre)

Chinmai Sharma, Global Head of Lodging, Ground & Sea for Sabre Travel Solutions, echoed those sentiments as well.

“The business is growing well,” Sharma said. “The hotel business especially has been growing in double digits for the past many months. Internally, we’ve been working on a bunch of initiatives, working with all our supply partners to make sure all our APIs are up to date so that we get the best content, which we can provide to our travel advisors. On the travel agency side, we continue to enhance our APIs and our platform capabilities. One of the interesting things that we’ve been working on for the last couple of years falls in what we call the lodging AI category, and that’s with our partnership with Google. We work on a lot of tools with them, and essentially they help us improve the workflow of the travel advisors and help them improve the hotel attach rate and you know, do more e-commerce onto the platform. So, most of our key initiatives are either on securing better content and upgrading our APIs or fine-tuning our retailing capabilities with the agency partners.”

Chinmai Sharma Global Head – Lodging, Ground & Sea Sabre Travel Solutions (Photo Credit: Sabre)

New Innovations

“One of the things that we’ve just launched is Sabre Mosaic, and this is for our airline partners to be able to retail in a modern efficient way,” Arthur said. “It’s best in class technology that is allowing our airline partners to provide an offer and order and the fulfillment piece through Sabre Mosaic. So, we’re really excited that was launched.”

Sabre Mosaic is powered by Google’s industry-leading AI capabilities.

“Defining and building the next generation of airline retailing solutions has been a significant investment and strategic priority for Sabre, and we are well down this path,” Kurt Ekert, President & CEO of Sabre said in a release. “SabreMosaic is the culmination of our dedication to innovation in airline IT and active collaboration with our airline partners to enable the future of modern retailing. With the success we are already seeing with Sabre’s Retail Intelligence suite of solutions, today’s announcement marks an important milestone on our path to delivering a fully open, modern and flexible retailing platform.”

Earlier this year, Sabre launched the new Sabre Red Launchpad tool in partnership with Internova Travel Group, one the world’s largest travel services companies. 

Sabre Red Launchpad hotel search (Photo Credit: Sabre)

It is an extension of Sabre Red 360, and it is designed to reduce training time for new-to-industry travel consultants.

“With Red Launchpad, one of the things that we’ve done is really creating a very easy to use graphical interface tool that allows for someone to really come off the street and with very, very little training to be able to kind of shop, book, fulfill travel for either leisure or corporate travel in a really in a very, very efficient way,” Arthur said. “[It’s] a best-in-class user interface, consumer grades, so something that you would experience if you were at home shopping on any kind of website, but it still meets the needs that a travel agency has with all their mid-back office tools, reporting capabilities, all in a very efficient way. Sabre Red Launchpad is a point and click, very easy to train, very easy to fulfill, very easy to do basic transactions. So, we’re really excited about it.”

It’s all in the name of working smarter, not harder, and making it easier for new people to start working in the travel industry.

“The initial feedback is pretty good,” Sharma said. “It has all the abilities to book most of the key requirements. And we do feel that the adoption rate and the penetration of this tool will only increase because in general the travel advisor community is going through a big change, just in terms of demographics and you know the kind of folks that are coming into the workforce. Launchpad is one such initiative so that it becomes easy for anybody to use, the learning curve is a lot shorter. It also gives us new capabilities to merchandise on the web. It’s new age. So, merchandising and display capabilities will be a lot better and our retailing capabilities will only improve.”

Sabre Red Launchpad air search (Photo Credit: Sabre)

Message for Travel Advisors

In closing, I asked both Arthur and Sharma what sort of message they’d like to share to the travel advisor community

“If you’ve not seen Sabre in a while or if you’re don’t know Sabre, I would recommend that you get out to see us, to attend one of the events that we participate in or what we’ve got through with Sabre.com where there’s a lot of information,” Arthur said. “Our Google partnership has really been a game changer for the ability to retail, to be able to drive additional revenue for transactions. So, we’ve really invested in our technology platform, and we’re really excited about what artificial intelligence is bringing to the agency community and really making travel fun and really easy to do.”

“We love the travel advisor community first of all,” Sharma said. “We’ve been doing this since 1964, we hope to continue to do this for, you know, a long time. Think of us as a travel platform and we’ll continue to make sure that we bring relevant content over to our travel advisor partners and then a fair amount of investment into product and technology is all going in keeping the travel advisors in mind. How can we take friction away from their workflow? How can we give back their time so that they can spend quality time with the traveler? With the advent of ML and AI, these tools and the adoption rates will only continue to increase. We are here to serve the travel advisor community and we hope to continue the engagement.”

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