Sabre Unveils New Operation Tools for Agents

Travel agents seeking to build customer loyalty, cope with airline unbundling of services and expand sales have a new tool from Sabre Travel Network with the launch of Sabre Red. Using Sabre Red, agencies will be able to respond nimbly to the emergence of airline ancillary fees and other merchandising initiatives, the growth in demand for mobile services, changes in preferred supplier agreements, the challenge of finding agents with GDS format knowledge, and ultimately to meet the needs of more informed and demanding travelers, Sabre says.

Unveiled at a Sabre-hosted event in Austria, Sabre Red features a range of new capabilities that span the entire spectrum of an agency’s business from shopping and booking travel, to serving customers throughout their trip, to using business intelligence for insight and continuous improvement. At the heart of Sabre Red is the Sabre Red Workspace, built on a future-ready, open platform that provides users with faster start-up times, stability, high performance even in low bandwidth areas, and application integration capabilities. Using the Red Workspace, agents will access a new environment and utilize a list of capabilities delivered as Sabre Red Apps that seamlessly plug into the Workspace. The flexibility of the Red Workspace will also enable agencies to integrate their own applications, providing a customized agent workflow tailored to their operational needs.

Other Sabre Red capabilities include:

*    Shop by Total Price – Shop and book travel by total price including applicable ancillary fees, enabling agencies to stay ahead of the merchandising trend.
*    Web and Mobile Traveler Self-Services – Building on Sabre’s leadership in mobile traveler services, new web and mobile self-service capabilities enable travelers to purchase and manage ancillary services, upgrade registration, check-in and more.
*    Mobile Traveler Messaging Service – Automated service enabling agencies to provide information to travelers at specific time and location points, e.g. pre-trip notifications (weather, ready for check-in, gates, delays); in-trip messaging (baggage carousel, delays); and arrival messaging (welcome home, solicit feedback).
*    Multi-Source Enabled - XML connectivity provides new air and hotel content and capabilities, and enables integration of air and hotel merchandising initiatives in a graphical workflow.
*    Preferred Supplier Optimization – Increase preferred supplier sales by up to 20 percent using a combination of business intelligence and a sophisticated rules engine to manage offline and online displays.
*    Post-Booking Automation – Save up to 10-20 minutes per transaction using automated exchanges (launching in 20 additional countries); and minimize potential for human error with process automation solutions that can enable over 90 percent touchless ticketing rates and 90 to 100 percent quality control compliance.
*    Graphical Workflow – A fully graphical workflow to manage customer profiles, shop and book air and hotel, handle ticket exchanges and much more, helping to reduce agent training time and keystrokes by up to 5 percent.
*    Multi-GDS Capable – Enables agencies who serve clients on more than one GDS to simplify their operations with standardized workflow across their customer base.

Visit www.sabre-holdings.com.