Sabre Travel Network launched Sabre Profiles, a system that provides greater security, structure and control for customer profile management, Sabre said.
The system will eventually replace Sabre’s current profile system, Sabre Stars.
In a webinar on Wednesday, Chris Kroeger, Sabre’s senior vice president of marketing, said that one of the main advantages of Sabre Profiles is that it allows agencies to store a traveler's corporate and personal information in one profile and then access the relevant data during the booking process, eliminating the need for multiple profiles.
Kroeger said that Sabre was looking to help its agency customers with a mix of corporate and leisure clients become more efficient.
“A lot of times, their customers overlap,” Kroeger said. “We wanted to make it more efficient for them to manage that individual whether it was corporate and leisure. Creating profiles to allow for the efficient serving for both the leisure and corporate traveler was critical to the design of our system.”
The system also allows agents to create associations between profiles of corporate travelers or family members, which Sabre said will offer increased efficiency, better customer service and enhanced marketing capabilities for travel agents.
“Families linked together makes it easier for agencies to execute some of the personalized services they want to deliver and some of the marketing campaigns,” Kroeger said. “We see a lot of demand for that.”
Sabre Profiles also gives travel agencies greater control over profile access and data management, Sabre said. In addition, the new system offers enhanced security to keep the data safe.
The system was beta-tested earlier this year, and will be launched globally this month. Sabre expects full integration of the program to be complete in 2013, at which point Sabre Stars will no longer be in use.
Sabre Profiles already has more than 30 million traveler profiles, as Sabre Airline Solutions began implementing the system with airline customers over a year ago, and a number of Sabre travel agency customers have already deployed Sabre Profiles using web services.
Kroeger said that with tens of thousands of Sabre customers around the world, and tens of millions of traveler profiles, it will take time for all agencies to migrate and upgrade to the new system.
The timeframe for each agency to upgrade, Sabre said, depends on the agency size and complexity of their existing database, and can take anywhere from several days to a month.