FORT WORTH, Texas -- Sabre rolled out a program allowing its
subscribers to book international specialty tours over the Internet
and to integrate the booking information with the customer's
passenger name record in Sabre.
The vendor said its integration of bookable Internet and CRS
content is an industry first.
Initially, the 41 agencies on Sabre's E-Commerce Council, an
advisory body created to launch the product, are using the product;
the capability will be phased in for other Sabre agencies over the
next several months.
Sabre is offering the new booking service through an arrangement
with Viator of Sydney, Australia, and it gives users access to the
Net through Agent Explorer, the vendor's Web portal for the
trade.
Because of the data integration feature, if an agent uses Agent
Explorer to book a winery tour in New Zealand for a client, for
example, the details will land in the same PNR that records the
client's flight to New Zealand booked in Sabre.
The PNR integration will help agents keep track of the bookings
and mesh them with their accounting systems, said Renee Alexander,
director of content acquisition for Sabre.
Viator, an on-line "content aggregator," is providing access to
some 600 specialty properties and tours in Australia, New Zealand
and a number of European countries, including France, Italy, Spain
and the U.K., Alexander said.
The bookable products are the sort of things that agents will
not find in a CRS and might find difficult and time-consuming to
research and book by other means, she said.
The first agent booking was a Sydney harbor cruise over the
millennium, Alexander said.
Alexander said Sabre plans to continue building the range of
products that can be booked through Agent Explorer, to add, for
example, Caribbean and adventure travel and golf tee-times.
The developments will give agents easy access to an expanded
array of product, which will help them serve clients better,
operate more productively and earn more money, Alexander said.
In general, she said, "The suppliers we are reaching out to are
eager to pay the agencies commissions." Agency customers will
benefit because they can prepay more of their trips, she said. That
means they can avoid standing in line for tickets to a specialty
tour once they arrive at their destination and don't run the risk
that a tour will be sold by the time they get there, she said.
Agent Explorer will give new groups of suppliers affordable
access to the Sabre agency network, and Sabre will be getting
additional content, at an affordable price, to offer its
subscribers, she said.
Sabre is evaluating ways to integrate the Agent Explorer
applications into the agency desktop so that front-line agents do
not have to switch in an out of Sabre in order to make the Internet
bookings.