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Brett Thorstad, Vice President, Agency Sales & Airline Distribution, Asia Pacific, Sabre Travel Solutions
Today travellers have more choice than ever before, so travel providers and sellers can truly differentiate by elevating personalisation and servicing to give travellers that tailored, seamless, end-to-end experience they want. Sabre corporation provides travel facilitators with a diverse range of options to stay on top. In an interview with Travel Daily Media, Brett Thorstad, Vice President, Agency Sales & Airline Distribution, Asia Pacific, Sabre Travel Solutions, tells us about Sabre Travel AI microservices, Lodging AI, EDIFACT, NDC and more.
Travel Daily Media (TDM): Tell us about Sabre’s partnership with Google. How is that helping in enhancing airline distribution for you? Kindly elaborate with a focus on Asia.
Brett Thorstad (BT): Our Google partnership is enabling innovation, cost-savings, and faster throughput across our business. It has encompassed a move to the Google Cloud and the development of Sabre Travel AI, which leverages state-of-the-art AI technology and advanced machine-learning capabilities in existing and future Sabre products.
What is important for our airlines is that they can choose Sabre as their trusted technology partner for their whole journey, as they advance their technological transformation at their own pace. Airlines want to distribute their content to our community of travel agents through our extensive Global Distribution System (GDS), and Sabre is also talking to many of our airline partners about how they can advance their retailing strategies through our Retail Intelligence suite of solutions, which are now part of our new AI-powered SabreMosaic Offer and Order retailing platform. We now have several airline partners, including Virgin Australia, who both distribute and retail through Sabre, which means they can create increasingly relevant offers for travellers through our advanced retailing solutions, and then distribute these offers to our network of global travel sellers.
TDM: Can you share with our travel trade readers a few pointers on streamlining travel operations and enhancing offerings through New Distribution Capability (NDC)?
BT: We’re experiencing growing NDC momentum, so it’s more important than ever that travel agencies ensure they don’t get left behind. We understand that each of our travel partners is on their own journey and has a different timeframe when it comes to NDC activation. The challenge here is that agencies can find themselves with different types and sources of content, and it can be impossible to compare them.
That’s why Sabre is solving for this potential complexity. We integrate and normalise content through our multi-source content platform, whether that is EDIFACT or NDC content, to make it easy for travel agencies to compare and book the right trip for their travellers. We’ve also activated a robust set of servicing capabilities to help maintain end-to-end agency workflows. This all means that when they choose Sabre’s multi-source content platform and activate NDC, agencies can rest easy knowing that they are not missing out on the content they need to drive revenue, and they can shop, compare, book, and service multi-source content with the operating scale and reliability their business requires.
We are designing for usability, operational efficiency and performance from day one to create a fully-integrated and simple experience. We recognize it is important for agents to support NDC bookings end-to-end, not just during the shopping phase. We understand that keeping agents operating efficiently – and supporting mid and back-office processes – are critical needs that must be supported if NDC is to gain widespread adoption. Despite different schemas, versions, and multiple content sources, we have to be able to normalise the content into one single workflow. The normalisation happens at the API level. The biggest differentiator is to be able to add multiple other content- EDIFACT, Hotels and Cars into a single PNR/Order
TDM: How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) aiding travel retailing? How can OTAs, travel agents and agencies use this to their advantage?
BT: At Sabre, Artificial Intelligence isn’t just a buzz phrase. Google’s AI and machine learning capabilities are already embedded in a number of our airline, agency, and hotel products, largely around retailing. For travel agencies of all types, we have a number of Sabre Travel AI microservices available to try right now with others in development. These include things like Lodging AI to help travel agencies improve hotel attachment rates, creating additional revenue opportunities and providing travellers with more personalised lodging options and Schedule Change Predictor to estimate the probability of cancelling or retiming of a flight between the time of sale and departure.
From a future innovation perspective, to enhance our own productivity and benefit our customers in terms of product development throughput, we have introduced generative AI tools to approximately 800 of our software engineers during the first quarter of the year. For our customers, there are an infinite number of future use cases we are looking at. GenAI also promises a very different search and booking process than we have had historically. In addition, there is a tremendous ability through AI to further automate that which is manual today to enhance servicing for our customers, and their customers.
TDM: How can the latest travel technology from Sabre be used to enhance B2B offerings in the face of growing B2C consumer dependence on AI and direct bookings? What is the way forward for travel facilitators?
BT: Traveller wants, needs and expectations have evolved exponentially over the past few years, and continue to do so. Travellers now expect the same kind of personalisation and streamlined experiences that they have come to take for granted in other retail and entertainment interactions.
Sabre builds products that can be leveraged across our entire ecosystem of customers. For our largest customers, who often have their own software development teams, we look to partner with them on best practices around generative AI, including our suite of AI microservices, and ensure we are providing access to the broadest content and highest quality APIs. And for our customers without in-house development teams, we are building into our core Sabre products, like Sabre Red 360, the latest automation tools and AI technology. For example, Lodging AI is now built into our core hotel product within Sabre Red 360 so that all Sabre users can take advantage of the lodging capability that analyzes property attributes, customer trip segmentation, and traveler preferences to generate custom lodging options and serve up properties that are most likely to be booked. While consumers have more choice than ever before, travel providers and sellers have the opportunity to truly different themselves by elevating personalisation and servicing to give travellers that tailored, seamless, end-to-end experience they want.
TDM: What are the travel trends that you foresee for the new age digital travel consumer?
BT: We’ll see increased adoption of advanced technology across the travel ecosystem as agencies, airlines, and hoteliers look to gain competitive advantage by meeting and exceeding the needs of digital-savvy consumers.
AI-powered solutions will change the way our travel partners create, retail, and service offers for travellers, leading to greater levels of personalization. Meanwhile, generative AI will change the way we, as consumers, search and book our travel. We are committed to continued innovation to ensure our customers have the technology and data needed now and into the future to truly understand the new age digital consumers we are talking about, and to enhance both revenue and traveller satisfaction by providing travellers with the travel experiences they want.
Meet the team at Sabre Space Delhi, which is set to take place on 26 June, 2024 and Sabre Space Mumbai to take place on 28 June, 2024.
The post AI-powered solutions will change the way travel partners create, retail, and service offers for travellers: Brett Thorstad appeared first on Travel Daily Media.
