Sabre has announced Sabre Vacations, a platform for travel advisors to book leisure and group travel booking. The roll-out to new and existing Sabre travel agency customers is expected to begin in July of 2023.
Sabre Vacations is a travel comparison tool to allow leisure travel advisors to shop, compare, book and service ready-made trips. It will initially include content such as packaged tours, hotels, cruises, rental cars, and travel insurance. Sabre Vacations is expected to replace Sabre’s current leisure-focused tool, Shop Holidays, by the fourth quarter of 2023.
Sabre’s research found that more than one-third of travel five days or more is being booked through tour operators.
“According to a forecast by Statista, the segment is expected to generate total revenues of close to 40 billion euros in 2023,” Sabre explained. “Sabre is investing in this growing segment with a solution that seeks to deliver a higher degree of personalization and a consumer-grade shopping experience rivaling the best digital brands.”
According to Sabre, the core elements of the shopping process are hotel “sets” that function like virtual catalogues – they allow travel advisors to define groups of specific hotels designed to meet the expectations of individual target groups.
“Drawing on the travel agents’ know-how and product expertise, the sets can be shared between users across an agency or consortia,” Sabre said. “To granularly address their customers’ wishes, travel agents can search and filter hotels by thousands of attributes provided by the tour operators, from water slides to Michelin-starred restaurants. Several hotels can be compared in a single view through a modern, user-friendly interface that enables customer-centric consultations.”
Check out will be done through a “click and book” process, and will include third-party integrations like back-office systems or trip proposal providers.
“We are very excited to unveil Sabre Vacations at ITB Berlin,” said Tom Fecke, regional director for Central & Eastern Europe at Sabre. “Leisure travel is a key component of Sabre’s strategy to create a new marketplace for personalized travel as well as an important growth opportunity, especially here in the DACH region. The initial feedback from our travel agency customers and tour operator partners during the usability testing phase has been very positive and we are sensing a strong demand for this new technology approach in the industry.”
The platform was developed with Peakwork, a leisure travel technology company.
Sabre Vacations is meant to make trip planning easier for travel advisors, as well as allow tour operators to provide targeted, group-specific offers and use flexible tools like dynamic packaging to provide additional growth opportunities.
Recent Comments