Sabre talks up speed and smart retailing as it launches airline platform

Sabre has named Aeroflot, Ethiopian Airlines and Etihad as launch partners for its Digital Airline Commercial Platform.

The platform has been developed to help airlines offer and sell their products and services across different channels in a more modern way, supported by new pricing and revenue management capabilities.

Sabre first touted the platform earlier this year at its Technology Exchange in Dallas in April.

Key features of the platform include a shopping engine called Smartshop, which it claims is the fastest in the industry relying on algorithms developed in-house instead of caching techniques used in the past.

A further feature is the API Hub which Sabre describes as a “modernized” API stack that “allows us to grow faster from a time-to-market perspective.” The API Hub will also open up the latest APIs to airline customers that want to use them to create their own online experiences.

The revenue optimization/management aspect of the platform aims to enable airlines to make decisions based on what consumers are currently shopping for and benchmark against what competitor airlines are doing as opposed to using historical booking data. The information is presented in a visual format so carriers can quickly adjust pricing according to demand and based on the most current market data.

One of the "outputs" of Sabre Travel Solutions, which was announced in July to bring together the PSS and GDS elements of the business to collaborate more, has been to better leverage the huge amounts of data within the company's revenue optimization technology. 

For agents

A final component is the Digital Workspace, which aims to be a mobile device-based tool for airline agents at airports. The technology enables agents to check in passengers as well as offer them ancillary services.

Explaining the thinking behind the airline platform, Dave Shirk, executive vice president and president of Travel Solutions, says it’s about the company’s approach to retail and distribution.

“The two largest areas of focus are what that retail experience needs to look like, how to set it up to be an Amazon-like experience and to make sure the shopping experience is second-to-none. This is not just incremental improvement but a 15 times performance improvement on anything that is available today.”

He adds that Sabre’s airlines customers will be the ultimate judges of the platform’s promises but that elements of it, such as revenue management, have also been tested by Passenger Origin/Destination Simulator Research (PODS) made up of consultants from the academic and aviation worlds.

“We built a model and asked them to test it. Could they find any weaknesses and did the algorithms work because we want the science behind this to be validated.”