Last Thursday, Sabre Corporation released Sabre Content Services for Lodging, a solution that will power both agency and corporate booking tools, and promises to eliminate the need for intensive manual research.
This came about because a significant amount of travel buyers’ time is “wasted” on manual comparison and booking of properties within company policy, said Kathy Morgan, vice president – NDC, Sabre.
The new solution simplifies the search process for agents by listing out not just comparable properties and room rates, but also all included ancillaries – such as breakfast and Wi-Fi – as well as room type, loyalty programme availability and whether each property fits the specified company policy.
It allows for a more user-friendly interface that lays out all of these parameters and ancillaries on a single screen, almost similar to consumer-facing booking platforms. This was achieved through integrating traditional GDS content from hoteliers, alongside OTA content from Booking.com, Bedsonline, and Expedia Partner Solutions.
The system currently features more than one million property options, and travel agencies have full flexibility to choose the aggregator content they would like to access. Moreover, in a usability study, Sabre found that such product normalisation can help agents reach a booking decision 30 per cent faster.
“We looked at the pain points and needs of customers on both sides of the network – the ‘demand’ side including TMCs, leisure agencies and corporations and the ‘supply’ side including hoteliers and lodging aggregators,” said Traci Mercer, senior vice president of lodging, ground and sea for Sabre Travel Network.
“The solution that we’ve developed to this long-standing and complex challenge will revolutionise the way travel agents shop for and book hotel content, making it easier and simpler for them to provide the best experience for their travellers.”
The new application programming interface (API) capabilities powering Sabre Content Services for Lodging will soon be incorporated across all Sabre solutions, including Sabre Red 360 and GetThere. Additional API enhancements will be added to Content Services for Lodging in 2020.
