Partnering with Google, Company accelerates availability of the travel industry’s first smart, scalable retail engine – with launch planned early next year.
SOUTHLAKE, TEXAS – Sabre Corporation announced it will be launching the company’s first product powered by its proprietary Sabre Travel AI technology. Working with Google, the company is developing technology that will accelerate the delivery of a smart, scalable retail engine that is powered by state-of-the-art AI technology and advanced machine-learning (ML) capabilities, the first of its kind in travel. The Company plans to officially launch the first iteration of its Sabre Smart Retail Engine early next year, continuing to innovate in omni-channel retailing to enable capabilities across airline business models, passenger service systems (PSS) and global distribution systems (GDS).
“We are excited to bring this intelligent retail engine to market as part of our offer management strategy, marking another step towards achieving our 2025 vision of delivering truly personalized travel,” said Wade Jones, chief product officer for Sabre. “Our proprietary technology infuses the power of Sabre Travel AI to deliver, not next-, but a third-generation of technology to the travel marketplace. By bringing together some of the brightest minds from Google and Sabre, we are accelerating the delivery of this smart and scalable retailing engine that we believe will enable customers to deliver personalized offers to their customers, better serving the needs of today’s traveler, while unlocking more value per passenger boarded.”
These advancements propel the Company’s offer management strategy forward, enabling it to achieve one of its strategic initiatives announced at the beginning of this year.
Smart Retailing: Powered by machine learning; Informed by marketplace insights
The first of its kind, the Sabre Smart Retail Engine is a new innovation that integrates Sabre’s dynamic offer management and customer segmentation capabilities with Google’s proven and powerful merchandising solution to use real-time shopping data, available content and AI/ML-based decision support models to test-and-learn and generate the most optimal offers available. These personalized offer bundles are dynamically priced using customer segmentation techniques, can include ancillaries such as seats and baggage and eventually will include third-party content, such as rental cars and hotel stays. This advances the Company’s vision to build and connect the right offer to the right traveler at the right time – increasing traveler satisfaction and providing airlines the opportunity to drive optimized and incremental revenue.
This is a significant addition to Sabre’s suite of offer management products that will include decision science-based pricing and revenue management tools integrated with cloud-based availability and shopping that support an omni-channel approach, including NDC distribution.
Key components of Sabre’s suite of offer management products will utilize:
- Science-based decision support: market-adaptive pricing powered by real-time insights from the traveler and the marketplace
- Proven cloud-based availability: single-product catalog for inventory, ancillaries and third-party content unlocking more value
- Next-generation shopping engine: live shopping engine that generates highly relevant personalized responses
- ML-powered retail engine: merchandising powered by machine learning, fostering experimentation in a test and learn environment to better inform and generate truly personalized offers
- Omni-channel opportunity: advancements in offer management will enable distribution across both indirect and direct channels.
Sabre Travel AI: An Industry-First in Travel Technology
Announced last month, Sabre Travel AI is infused with Google’s state-of-the-art AI technology and advanced machine-learning capabilities that will help customers deliver highly relevant and personalized content more quickly, to better meet the demands of today’s traveler and create expanded revenue and margin growth opportunities. Specifically, Sabre Travel AI capitalizes on Google Cloud AI solutions and automated machine learning tools that sense, analyze and predict consumer behaviors – using real-time shopping and sophisticated travel-specific business insights.
This game-changing innovation is designed to enable airlines, agencies, corporations, hoteliers and other travel partners to take their retailing and digital customer experience strategies to the next level. By delivering the right offer, at the right time across all relevant channels, they will be positioned to deliver tailored personalization to travelers that should fortify traveler loyalty and drive higher conversion rates.
Building the Future of Travel: Together, Sabre and Google Cloud Accelerate Innovation
The innovation of Sabre Smart Retail Engine was accelerated through Sabre’s strategic relationship with Google and specifically part of the two companies’ Innovation Framework – bringing the companies together to imagine, develop and deploy future capabilities that will advance the travel ecosystem.
“We are pleased to be working side-by-side with Sabre to bring innovative, industry-first technologies to the travel space,” said Ravi Simhambhatla, Managing Director, Digital Transformation Officer – Travel & Transportation of Google Cloud. “Today’s announcement, as well as Sabre Travel AI, are what we hope will be the first of many concepts generated from our partnership.”
Over time, the company plans to integrate its intelligent and scalable technology across the breadth of the Sabre omni-channel retail, distribution and fulfillment offering including merchandising, availability, pricing, revenue management and optimization and GDS marketplace services. As previously noted, Sabre plans to officially launch the Sabre Smart Retail Engine early next year with additional products to follow.
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She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication & Mass Media from Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens and she has been editor and editor-in-chief in various economic magazines and newspapers.
