Tag Archives: Sabre

Samual Machado, Managing Director for India and South Asia, Sabre Travel Solutions said, “The data shows that India travel market will be more than $250 billion worth in the next four to five years. When it comes to challenges, the speed at which we are growing will bring a lot of challenges to us. One of these challenges is technology adaptation, which will be a huge challenge in India because most of the agencies that we have are brick and mortar. They all have to invest to make sure that they are elevating the offline travel business to online travel business.” 

According to Sabre’s new India trends report, As of March 2023, bookings are back to 100% of pre-pandemic levels for domestic trips and are at nearly 100% of pre-pandemic levels for international trips, with domestic capacity having already exceeded pre-pandemic levels

Brett Thorstad Vice President, Travel Solutions, Agency Sales, Asia Pacific, Sabre said, “We are seeing that travellers are looking for hyper-personalised buying experience. So, there is a need on the airline side on how they like to retail and the desire on the consumer side to purchase travel the way they like to.”  

Mike Barrera, VP, Product Management, Low-Cost Carrier Segment, Sabre said that LCCs need to prioritize choosing a technology partner which offers security and reliability; ensuring their chosen technology is easy to use and train, especially given staff shortages and high turnover rates in the current travel industry; and selecting best-of-breed technology that has scalability and modularity so offer management systems can interact seamlessly with order systems. 

New research by Sabre identifies prominent shifts in travel. The results indicate that revenge travel with the objective of making up for lost time is a meaningful phenomenon, with 68% of travel leaders responding that they are forecasting a higher spend from consumers on their future travel plans. More than a third of airline and agency leaders participating in the survey indicated that they believe travel will return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2024; a further third responded that they believe this will happen in 2025 or beyond. 

“Rumours regarding Air India shutting down or closing operations are all baseless,” Air India CMD Ashwani Lohani said in a tweet. His statement read, “Rumours regarding Air India shutting down or closing operations are all baseless. Air India would continue to fly and also expand and there should be no cause for concern whatsoever to travellers, corporates or agents. Air India the national carrier is still the biggest airline of India.” In a bid to cut down its losses, the national carrier has recently ended the 20-year-old partnership with Sabre on account of higher premium and has entered into a partnership with Amadeus GDS. Sabre was the second-largest GDS for Air India after Travelport with nearly 25 per cent share in international GDS sphere of the airline. Air India had ended its GDS partnership with Amadeus for the domestic segment in December 2018. Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri had clarified on December 31, 2019 that the national carrier, which is incurring a loss of Rs 20-26 crore daily, will keep on running till it is privatised. While Air India’s net loss in 2018-19 was around Rs 8,556 crore, its current total debt is around Rs 80,000 crore.

In a major setback to state-run Air India, the High Court of Punjab and Haryana has overruled the national carrier’s decision to shift domestic ticket-booking business exclusively on Travelport, asking it to continue using the services of Amadeus and others to book domestic and international flights. Air India had discontinued services of all other global distribution system (GDS) portals from December 5, 2018. The judgement of the HC read, “An interim direction is issued to Air India Limited to continue to allow using GDS of Travelport, Sabre and Amadeus, as was being used prior to Decemeber 4, 2018 and till further orders, Air India inventory will be made available to Amadeus also, as was being done prior to December 4, 2018.” The court has given Air India three weeks’ time to respond to the judgement with relevant documents. The court noted that under Article 12, the Air India was duty-bound to invite bids before giving exclusive rights to any agency for GDS. It is further contended that Air India was duty-bound to call bids in the form of tenders and that Amadeus could not be arbitrarily excluded from sale of tickets for domestic flights. Source: Moneycontrol  

Sabre Corporation has announced a renewed, full content distribution agreement with Jet Airways effective April 2019. Sabre’s extended agreement with Jet Airways provides Sabre-connected agents across India and the world a path to access the full content of Jet Airways into year 2024. With over 100 million passengers choosing Indian carriers for their travel since the beginning of the year and domestic air travel growing by 21.2 per cent over the same period, in less than 10 years the World Travel & Tourism Council expects India to become the world’s fourth-largest travel and tourism economy behind China, the United States and Germany. Rakesh Narayanan, Vice President, Air Line of Business, Sabre Travel Network Asia Pacific, said, “As a long-term technology partner to Jet Airways, providing the airline with unmatched solutions that enable superior passenger services, Sabre is well positioned to support the carrier’s growth objectives. Today, we are pleased to provide Jet Airways with the ability to share their content through Sabre’s leading global travel marketplace, which will in turn contribute to their ongoing business success.”

About 650 participants from across Asia Pacific have gathered at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore to get an in-depth understanding of Sabre technology offerings across the airline, hotel and travel distribution portfolios. The new Sabre approach is highly content driven and offers an array of technology solutions under one roof. Participants have gathered from over 30 countries for this innovative and informative event.    

Sabre Corporation has been recognised by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as NDC Level 3 capable as an IT provider. Reaching this milestone less than two months after announcing Level 2 capability, Sabre accelerates its commitment to leading the evolution of retailing and distribution technology. By granting Sabre ‘NDC capable’ Level 3 status under the NDC certification programme, IATA recognises that Sabre supports deployments using offer and order management messages whose schema are compliant with the standard NDC message schema. Sabre has therefore demonstrated its ability to provide a broad range of retailing capabilities to a variety of sellers, including end-to-end offer and order fulfillment and servicing. Along with the ability to create and personalize offers, Level 3 capability indicates that Sabre is now positioned to fulfill and service those orders throughout the entire process in both direct and indirect channels. A major component of this includes verifying offer integrity and ensuring that the order management system can accurately enforce orders based on the rules of the original offer. It is Sabre’s leading position at the centre of the travel industry that empowers it to leverage data from a variety of sources, ultimately reinforcing offer integrity and fulfilment. Going forward, Sabre is actively working to deploy these capabilities in the coming months through close collaboration with its customers. Sabre is also certified as an NDC Level 1 aggregator, with a roadmap to reaching Level 3 in 2018.