Google to play pivotal role in Sabre’s new growth plan

Travel tech giant Sabre has unveiled its multi-year plan designed to accelerate growth and create long-term shareholder value.

As part of its vision to lead a new marketplace for personalised travel, Sabre has detailed five strategic initiatives that are intended to increase the company’s addressable market across its business, deliver revenue and market share growth, and improve its overall margin structure.

Among the priorities for Sabre are creating personalised offers, increasing the value of supplier offers and the value of the GDS by integrating NDC content, creating more ways for low-cost carriers LCCs to retail and distribute content, and delivering a full-service property management system in partnership with Accor to better serve enterprise hotels.

But perhaps the most intriguing priority for Sabre is transforming its technology via a preferred partnership with Google.

This 10-year strategic partnership is designed to improve Sabre’s technology capability by migrating the company’s IT infrastructure to Google Cloud’s services with “advanced support and greater flexibility”.

According to Sabre, the company will utilise Google’s data analytics tools to enhance current and future products, with the goal of improving both loyalty and revenues for customers.

Furthermore, Sabre will set out to design a broader innovation framework with Google that seeks to “leverage the talent and assets of both companies to imagine, develop and deploy future capabilities that will advance the travel ecosystem, benefiting all market participants”.

Sabre president and CEO Sean Menke said: “We are committed to helping our customers operate more efficiently, drive revenue and offer personalised traveller experiences that create greater loyalty.

“Over the last year, we continued to see shifts in the travel ecosystem resulting in the changing needs of our airline, hotel and agency customers.

“We are thinking critically about how the retailing, distribution and fulfilment of travel will continue to evolve over the next decade and how each of these elements will become even more interconnected and interdependent.”

Menke said Sabre has committed US$150 million ($230.5 million) in 2020 to support the five strategic priorities, which were unveiled during its annual global leadership summit in Dallas in late January.