Sabre Inks Pact With German Aggregator To Add Hotel Content

Sabre Travel Network has signed a multiyear agreement with a German hotel aggregator that it said will significantly enhance its content during the next few years.

The global distribution system supplier last week announced the agreement with Nuremberg-based Hotel.de, which claims access to about 210,000 hotel properties, and the agreement will allow Sabre to provide new hotel shopping capabilities to its agencies as well as corporations using its GetThere booking tool. Hotel.de in turn will be able to use Sabre's XML connection so that its agencies and users can shop and book across multiple destination points.

"Through this agreement, we are further expanding our already fulsome hotel content, and delivering a more efficient, automated and robust shopping experience for agents," said Martin Cowley, Sabre Travel Network senior vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in a statement. "This is an important milestone in our strategy to continuously broaden and enhance our hotel solutions across Europe, and deliver on our promise to provide agents what they want most: the ability to easily and efficiently book and manage all their travel through the Sabre GDS."

Sabre's GDS currently has content from more than 84,500 hotel properties in 240 countries around the world. Although much of Hotel.de's content is already present in Sabre and some is not applicable to agency customers, Sabre expects it and similar aggregator agreements completed during the past year to add thousands of new hotels to the system, with some of Sabre's largest annual increases ever expected during the next few years, a company spokesperson said.