Sabre announces new deals with two hotel giants

Travel tech player Sabre has eked out new deals with hotel giants Accor and Oyo Hotels & Homes.

In collaboration with Accor, Sabre intends to develop a new full-service property management capability and enrich its existing central reservation and limited-service property management systems.

These capabilities will combine within a new unified cloud-native, “highly flexible” platform that both company’s said will be built for and available to hoteliers across all property classes and geographic regions.

In this context, Accor would be Sabre’s newest enterprise hospitality customer, adopting Sabre’s SynXis Central Reservation system and, ultimately, the new global technology platform for all its hospitality brands and geographies.

“We are thrilled to be collaborating with Accor and look forward to redefining the guest experience together,” Sabre Corporation president and CEO Sean Menke said in a statement.

“We know our customers have historically had limited options in this area, and we are taking the lead to deliver the solutions that hoteliers have repeatedly told us they both want and need.”

Sabre also recently revealed it had signed a strategic long-term agreement with Oyo Hotels & Homes.

With this partnership, Sabre explained, OYO will be connected to almost 900,000 travel agents globally, through the GDS connectivity solution powered by Sabre Hospitality Solutions’ SynXis platform.

This will help OYO generate increased bookings and open up additional revenue opportunities for its asset owners worldwide.

The announcement follows news that OYO, once touted among the world’s fastest growing companies, is planning to lay off more than 1,000 of its staff internationally.

In an email sent to Indian employees, Oyo’s founder Ritesh Agarwal confirmed what were then held as rumours, but did not specify the exact number of staff to lose their jobs.

An Oyo insider, however, told Skift: “at the moment it would be over 1,000 in India, 600 in China, and very few in other markets.”

In the financial year ending March 2019, Oyo reportedly chalked up losses of around $493 million (Rs 2,400 crores) – six times more than the previous financial year.

With a public listing eyed in two to three years, the company is under pressure to clean up its act, restore its image, and be profitable.