Sabre Signs US Airways Content Deal
US Airways today followed Northwest Airlines' recent precedent by announcing a five-year agreement with Sabre Holdings to provide full content, building upon the carrier's arrangement with the global distribution system.
At the core of the agreement, US Airways will continue to display all published fares in the Sabre GDS for an undisclosed transaction fee. The terms of deal—which the carrier and Sabre are closely guarding—also include new partnerships between the carrier and Sabre-owned Travelocity, which will become "exclusive content supplier" for US Airways' Web site. Through the agreement, Sabre for the first time gains full content from the America West brand, which merged with US Airways last year.
Although US Airways would not comment on the pricing arrangement with Sabre, Scott Kirby, executive vice president of sales and marketing told BTN today, "We are happy with the economics."
Sabre chairman and CEO Sam Gilliland also said this morning during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call that it would not disclose financials of the deal.
"We're in productive discussions with the airlines you'd expect us to be talking to at this point and we're tracking pretty closely to where we wanted to be," said Gilliland. "We said we expected we'd get deals done in the late part of 2005 and early into 2006. That's what we're doing and we continue to work through negotiations with a number of other carriers. The other thing I would say is, we're being patient. We're interested in getting to a good place with each of these airlines, that they feel good about the model that we're pushing forward."
Sabre today announced that total revenue last year jumped 18 percent over 2004 to $2.5 billion. The company today also said more than 250 carrier agreements are effective for 2006 pricing—of which non-DCA carriers are providing full content for one-year contract terms. During the company's conference call, president of Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Airlines Solutions Tom Klein said that overall pricing for such carriers had gone up.