Sabre this month released or in upcoming months plans to release new applications for agents and corporate subscribers, including new point-of-sale functionalities, a greater breadth of mid-office tools and new data management functions, including a turnkey traveler tracking and security tool due out later this year.
As Sabre Travel Network's last-minute signing of American Airlines solidifies content assurances from all six legacy carriers, the global distribution system is eager to provide a number of technology launches for its agency subscribers, who now bear the brunt of distribution economics.
"Content is the foundation. We understand that," Sabre Travel Network North America senior vice president Chris Kroeger told BTN. "Some people might think that's all we've been focused on for the past couple of months, but concurrent to that we've been ensuring that we continue to invest in tools and solutions that bring value to our corporate customers and our leisure customers. On the corporate side, once you have content secured as a foundation, what do you do on top that?"
Sabre this month introduced its next generation of tools for "shopping, pricing and managing fares," including "broad improvements to the Sabre Air suite, including the Sabre MyFares fare management system, core pricing and shopping capabilities and customizable fare displays."
Sabre said the new capabilities enable agents and corporate subscribers to more easily find the most applicable airfares, while also weeding out the lowest fares more frequently, enabling more alternative itineraries and fare options and delivering on "more efficient distribution of negotiated fares and prices itineraries more accurately than ever before." Sabre said most agencies are being upgraded to the new system and as of this summer the platform was in place for more than 50 percent of its user base worldwide.
Kroeger also said the TurboSabre product, for those that have "very high volume, very structured work environments and very call-center-focused environments," would be Sabre's other interface going forward, but it's "unique for a certain subset of our customers."
"We have a multitude of agency desktops today," Kroeger said. "We are making a conscious effort to put all of our resources into two desktops going forward. One is MySabre, which can be configured for the corporate side or the leisure side. MySabre is the platform that we will be investing as our primary platform."
Kroeger also said Sabre is building a set of mid-office tools that include elements of automated quality control, touchless ticketing and unused ticketing reporting technologies. "We're bringing those capabilities into a set of solutions that will be available to our customers by the end of the year," he said.
Sabre also is working on new technologies to help agencies assess fees—perhaps the ones they're charging due to new distribution economics—to customers.
"Increasingly, agencies and corporations are defining very sophisticated service-fee models. When they first came out, they were just flat fees," Kroeger said. "Everybody knows that different reservations and different transactions are different in value, so agencies and corporations are looking to say, 'We want to be more granular in how we introduce service fees.' They then want the flexibility to apply the right service charge in the right place. We have the service-fee capability today. This is enhancing that and becoming more sophisticated, more granular in terms of how corporations and agencies can set up their service-fee models."
Sabre during the National Business Travel Association conference in Chicago this year unveiled its upcoming traveler-tracking tools. Sabre said it will build new tracking systems that can serve either as a turnkey—for agencies without such systems—or a complement for those that have their own. "Providing traveler-tracking capabilities, if done properly, levels the playing field and may marginalize those of us who have made proprietary investments into such products," said John Smith, president of Chicago-based travel management firm Tower Travel Management.
Meanwhile, Sabre Holdings this month appointed a new leadership team to handle technology. Overseeing the technology functions, Barry Vandevier moved from the Travelocity unit to become chief information officer enterprisewide and Robert Wiseman—who moved to Sabre from Galileo this spring—moves from chief architect to chief technology officer.