Sabre Corp. is taking a new approach to how it deals with hotel inventory.
Traci Mercer, senior vice president of lodging, ground, and sea, said that for the first time it will integrate multirepresentational hotel content with traditional GDS content.
Home to this union will be the new Sabre Content Services for Lodging, a solution designed to accommodate multiple sources of content.
In the past, Mercer said, if both Sabre and an aggregator had a hotel in their inventories, Sabre would stick with its own listing and “say no thank you” to the aggregator’s.
But eventually, Sabre realized it might be missing out on opportunities. While it is true that a hotel might be listed at different price points by different aggregators, the end products that are offered are not necessarily identical.
Hotel prices might include breakfast, an option for late checkout, access to a health club or any number of added features, Mercer said.
For Phase 1 of Content Services, “We said, ‘Let’s put all of them in here.’”
The result is that the user can see side-by-side comparisons of what exactly is on offer for any given price point.
Sabre Content Services for Lodging, which will launch later this year, has initial agreements with Bedsonline, TravelBound and the Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) to create critical mass at the outset.
Bedsonline brings a portfolio of more than 170,000 properties in 120 countries, and TravelBound reaches customers in 190 countries and offers more than 50,000 hotels.
EAN will provide access to more than 350,000 properties worldwide and offer more than 650,000 exclusive deals on accommodations.
In total, the first phase will deliver more than 900,000 property options from both the Sabre GDS and non-GDS sources such as aggregators, redistributors and agency-sourced hotel content.
The integration of aggregator and GDS hotel content will make travel agents and corporate booking tool providers more efficient and effective and confident by increasing the depth and breadth of their hotel offerings, Mercer said.
She said Sabre will be launching with two or three more aggregators this year. “Then we will re-evaluate to see where we need to supplement our inventory.”
Sabre also is moving toward the release of APIs for large TMCs that have built their own user interfaces and want to use Sabre Content Services for Lodging’s inventory.