It must be the week for trying to improve the working life of travel agents, with Sabre following rival Travelport with new desktop tools via its Sabre Red Workspace.
The so-called graphical view on Sabre Red has been gradually rolled out to some Sabre-connected agents over the past month, with a big focus on reducing the number of keystrokes used to search and book air, hotel, car hire and other products.
Sabre claims the new system allows agents to complete bookings 20% faster than on the previous desktop platform, with 30% fewer keystrokes to complete a reservation.
The new desktop is currently being used by "several hundred" agents around the world, with deployment continuing into the first half of 2012 when 170,000 agents are encouraged to switch over.
The push for Sabre's new system came just a day after Travelport unveiled its SmartPoint app layer for Galileo-connected agents, giving them calendar and mouse-driven functionality, as well as a GDS cryptic command translation service.