A NEW SABRE
Sabre has announced a strategic realignment of its airline and agency-focused businesses, as well as other measures to support a new organisational structure.
The company is to end furloughs by July 6 with plans to adopt a flexible, remote work program and other measures to support new organisational structure.
On June 4, Sabre’s president and chief executive officer, Sean Menke (pictured above), stated,
“Today, we announced a critical step toward completing our transformation into a new Sabre. We began this transformational journey over two years ago with the unveiling of our SabreNext strategy and the creation of our Travel Solutions organisation. Our leadership team has completed plans to strategically realign and fully combine Sabre’s airline and agency-focused businesses to provide a stronger, more seamless experience for our customers.”
Sabre’s leadership team has been working on transformational change and building a foundation to position the company for growth.
The team has been focused on three areas:
- the security, stability and health of its technology products and services;
- enhancing collaboration across the company’s business segments to accelerate the creation of end-to-end solutions for its customers;
- and building a leadership team throughout the organisation that will lead Sabre into the next phase of its journey to become the trusted technology partner of the travel industry.
One Sabre: Delivering Value to Customers Through a Collective Lens
The strategic realignment of its business segments will, says Menke, further enable Sabre to deliver on its “promise to retail, distribute and fulfil travel by serving its airline and agency customers through a collective lens”.
In addition, the company reaffirms its long-term vision to create a new market for personalised travel, as it takes steps to become the technology platform positioned at the centre of the business of travel. The Company also remains committed to the strategic initiatives it first announced in February of this year.
To that end, Sabre will continue to:
- Focus on creating personalised offers with IT capabilities, processes and intelligence that allow suppliers to retail personalised offers through all channels, with an eye toward delivering experiences that today’s travellers want and unlocking more value per passenger boarded.
- Drive the future of distribution, including NDC, by increasing the value of supplier offers and the value of the GDS, enabling airlines to distribute personalised offers through the Company’s marketplace and through their direct channels.
- Unlock growth potential in the fast-growing low-cost carrier (LCC) market by creating more ways for LCCs to retail and distribute content and scaling the offerings of recently-acquired Radixx.
- Deliver a full-service property management system to better serve enterprise hotels, collaborating with Accor, to build a full-service property management system that will combine with its best-in-class central reservation and state-of-the-art limited service property management systems within a fully unified, cloud-native platform designed for hoteliers of all property classes, sizes and geographic regions – a milestone in the global travel industry.
- Transform Sabre’s technology in a 10-year preferred, strategic partnership with Google that includes:
- (1) improving Sabre’s technology capability by migrating the company’s IT infrastructure to Google Cloud’s highly available and secure services with advanced support and greater flexibility; (2) utilising Google’s data analytics tools to enable Sabre to enhance the capabilities of current and future products;
- and (3) designing a broader innovation framework with Google that seeks to optimise the talent and assets of both companies to imagine, develop and deploy future capabilities that will advance the travel ecosystem, benefiting all market participants.
Menke concluded, “Sabre is mission-critical to the travel ecosystem. While we had to put certain initiatives and technology investments on hold in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we remain steadfast in our commitment to helping our customers operate more efficiently, drive revenue and offer personalised travel experiences that benefit travellers, travel suppliers, and agencies. This pandemic has caused major shifts in the travel ecosystem resulting in the changing needs of our airline, hotel and agency customers. We have taken this opportunity to accelerate the organisational changes we began in 2018 to address the changing travel landscape. Sabre’s new organisation is built upon the premise that the retailing, distribution and fulfilment of travel will continue to evolve over the next decade and each of these elements will become even more interconnected and interdependent.”
