Mark Pestronk
Q: Sabre has sent our travel agency a new document that will govern our access to NDC bookings in the Sabre GDS. The new document is titled "Global Agency New Distribution Capability Program General Terms and Conditions." Our Sabre rep told us that we must sign in order to continue to make NDC bookings through Sabre. I have a bunch of questions about these terms and conditions. Does it form part of our long-term Sabre contract that we signed last year? Is there anything in the terms and conditions that we should object to or try to change?
A: The NDC terms and conditions form is an agreement that is not part of your main Sabre agreement, which is called either the Sabre Subscriber Agreement or Sabre Customer Agreement. So any contract protections that you already have do not apply to NDC bookings.
The NDC terms and conditions are different from every Sabre agreement I have ever reviewed. For example, all other Sabre agreements specify the commercial terms right in the agreement, but the NDC terms and conditions make them a trade secret.
Sabre offers incentives for some NDC bookings on some carriers, but the carriers are not named in the NDC terms and conditions. Similarly, while Sabre charges fees for NDC bookings on some carriers, you cannot find the names of those carriers in the agreement.
The carriers' names are found only at the Sabre Central website, which is accessible only by Sabre agencies. Sabre reserves the right to change the carriers at any time without advance notice by changing the website.
Uniquely, the NDC terms and conditions have a sliding scale of incentives, with Sabre sometimes offering the same segment incentive as in your standard Sabre agreement for some NDC segments, but many other NDC segments have lower incentives. The same with fees: You must pay a higher fee per segment on some NDC bookings than on others.
Another key difference is that the legal terms of the standard Sabre agreement stay in effect for the length of the agreement, which is typically five years, although some Sabre agencies have longer of shorter terms. In contrast, Sabre can change the legal terms of the NDC terms and conditions at will by merely posting the changes on the Sabre Central website.
Perhaps the most startling difference is that, under the standard Sabre agreement, neither party may terminate the agreement without cause, whereas either party may terminate the NDC terms and conditions at any time on 30 days' notice. If your agency depends on GDS incentives for a sizable part of its revenue, Sabre's termination could be disastrous.
Perhaps Sabre's long-term goal is to adapt the changeable-commercial-and-legal-terms and 30-day-termination structure to all of its contracts with travel agencies worldwide. Such a structure would put GDS contracts on a par with other kinds of software-as-a-service agreements.
Of course, if you have sufficient clout with Sabre, you can try to have Sabre agree to changes, such as making the NDC terms an amendment to your Sabre agreement and therefore subject to the same commercial and legal protections that you may already have.