Sabre Corp. is launching a new retailing platform for carriers that will enable airlines to take an "offer and order" approach to their retailing strategies, the company announced.
The SabreMosaic platform will include 10 new product suites, including offers and orders, alongside Sabre's existing AI-powered offerings that help carriers with the sales and pricing of fares and ancillaries, which Sabre has been developing as part of its partnership with Google. Some parts of the platform are available now—including a retail intelligence solution and a New Distribution Capability IT solution—and the full market launch of all 10 suites will be later this year, Sabre SVP of product management Michael Reyes said in a media call earlier this week.
As its name suggests, SabreMosaic will enable airlines to select which products they need to fit their own retailing strategies.
"It enables a spectrum of airline retailing strategies," Reyes said. "That ranges from a traditional approach to many more progressive and advanced retail optimization techniques."
Carriers listed by Sabre as working with Sabre and SabreMosaic on their retailing strategies include Virgin Australia, Air Serbia, Oman Air and American Airlines, which is collaborating with Sabre "on a proof-of-concept for SabreMosaic that keeps a seamless traveler experience at the core," according to American Airlines VP of revenue engineering Marcial Lapp.
The Amazon analogy often is invoked when describing the offer-order approach, but Reyes said the parallel includes the journey of Amazon compares with what it is trying to solve as well. Amazon began as a seller of books and expanded to the broad range of merchandise offered today, just as airlines will evolve from selling just fares to broader ancillaries and even other travel products such as hotels or ground transportation, he said. That will not happen with legacy technology, however.
"It isn't that it's impossible to sell all these pieces of merchandise in the legacy world," Reyes said. "It's just that these existing systems simply weren't designed to sell all these things."
Sabre said SabreMosaic will help carriers move away from "the limitations of today's PNR-driven world" to API-based offer and order solutions, as the International Air Transport Association is moving the industry in that direction.
"Airlines are going to move down this evolution at their own pace," Reyes said. "Sabre is at the forefront of giving them the tools they need to be ready for the new offer and order world, and we've orchestrated them to work for our airlines who are moving at different speeds along this journey."