Sabre Sees NDC Booking Growth, but Personalization Promise Still on the Horizon

Expert Q&A

A Q&A with Sabre SVP Todd Arthur

Sabre’s Arthur discusses:

What’s holding up the personalization side of NDCHow Sabre’s tapping Google’s AI muscles‘Consistent’ corporate travel growth since November

Over the past year, Sabre has had a flurry of announcements on new carriers and partners for New Distribution Capability content. Has that translated to a growth in NDC bookings? Sabre SVP for Sabre’s North America agency and Americas delivery and corporate travel solutions spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker during the Global Business Travel Association annual convention in Atlanta about NDC pick-up as well as corporate travel trends in North America and the benefits of its migration to Google Cloud, which it completed earlier this year.

[Editor's note: This interview was conducted prior to Turkish dropping out of Sabre]

BTN: What progress have you made with NDC over the past year?

Todd Arthur: The progress the overall industry has made, but particularly that Sabre has made in the NDC world, is quite significant. We have over 20 airlines live now. [Editor’s note: Since this interview was conducted, Sabre had NDC announcements with Hawaiian Airlines and WestJet]. By the end of the year, we will have 35 airlines, and that represents around 80 percent of our total requests that come in. We have around 100 airlines on our roadmap that we’re talking to or are in different stages. The second thing, we’ve seen a really steady increase in ramp of volumes, starting in the first quarter. We continue to see, from a very small base, almost a hockey stick on bookings. To me, that says we continue to meet our deadlines we said we are going to deliver on, and that the system has been pressure tested to manage NDC at scale. We’re really excited to have met those delivery timelines but also to start to see that NDC is producing some bookings, because that’s what the rest of the industry is looking for.

BTN: What benefits has that produced for customers? Is it all about pricing, or are there other benefits?

Arthur: In the early stages, it’s been more airlines producing offers. It’s been more driven competitively against the EDIFACT product. We haven’t seen real personalization as of yet, but we do believe that’s coming. The capabilities are there. We’re just seeing the airline taking an offer and producing an order. The whole promise of NDC is personalization, things they’ll know about [you] that will make the customer experience improved, but we’ve not seen that yet. We’re dependent upon the airline to produce that personalization. When we launched Sabre Mosaic, that allows airlines the technical chops to produce those unique bundles and personalized offers. We do anticipate personalization, and that will be baby steps, similar to getting off the paper tickets. That took a few years.

BTN: What else has been the focus as far as technology at Sabre?

Arthur: We have completed our migration to Google Cloud. That was a not-quite-four-year project, so that [consumed a] big part of our focus. Now that it’s done, we’ve been launching a lot of unique deliverables with our partnership with Google. Sabre Mosaic is one. Sabre Travel AI, we’re helping customers improve hotel attachment rate through artificial intelligence and looking at a lot of efficiency tools. For the corporate travel [agency] space, that’s vitally important for their business to be able to run efficiently and grow without adding headcount. That’s why you’ve seen a lot of users being moved and migrated over to Sabre.

BTN: With AI, what’s the level of caution you’ve been seeing with agency clients?

Arthur: What we’ve seen is there’s a huge opportunity we’re just tapping into to improve operational efficiencies at agencies. The byproduct of that is improving the customer experience—things like email requests coming in and being able to use AI to fulfill that task and maybe present alternate hotel options if a hotel is sold out, either directly to the traveler or through the travel consultant, improving efficiencies and the travel experience. There are a lot of products you’ll see that are in testing mode right now, building with our partnership with Google, that you’ll see come to the marketplace in the very near future. We’re significantly ahead of the curve in the sense that our partnership is with Google. They know how to take things with data and use AI to improve the user experience. 

BTN: What corporate travel trends are you seeing in North America?

Arthur: Since November of [2023], we have seen a consistent growth month over month in the corporate TMC space, which is really exciting for us. Since Covid, there have been different projections of what recovery will look like. We had a lot of unevenness over the last few years, where we’d see recovery coming in the TMC space, and then it would slow down. [The growth since November] is quite significant, as more and more companies return to the offices. That also has been a contributor to people getting out and traveling again, with being able to get out and see customers again. In Sabre, in September we’re coming back into the office three days a week, as are many of our customers. We’ve also been excited to have had a number of conversions, which have been made public. I’ll name two, Duluth Travel and National Travel, and both of those were awarded and implemented a month early. Those also give agencies confidence that in making big decisions, we will deliver on the migration and customer service.

BTN: What has been the key driver of those customer conversions?

Arthur: The drive is agencies understand the importance of technology in the landscape, and it’s important they have best-in-class technology in their operations as well as servicing. With the products that we’ve brought to market that bring a lot of efficiencies to operations, that’s been one of the key drivers. The company needs to grow but grow without adding more people, and they can only do that through technology solutions that make their operations more efficient. There are a number of automation tools and solutions that Sabre has bought to the marketplace that continue to drive value, and also our partnership with Google. 

BTN: What’s under development with GetThere?

Arthur: It’s a big presence for us, and we have had a number of enhancements. One of the things we’re proud of in November of [2021], we were the first booking tool to release NDC, and we’ve continued to make a number of enchantments to the user experience as well as the back-end capabilities. We’re really proud of the advancements that we’ve made.