Sabre Google partnership promises a ’Golden Age’ of Travel Retail
Lee Hayhurst sat down with Mike Reyes, Sabre vice president of platform product management, at the recent T2RL 'Engage' conference in London to hear more about its vision for supporting retailers that are ambitious to become the 'Amazon of travel. The COVID pandemic has accelerated efforts to sunset the traditional travel technologies and this is expected to usher in a golden age of travel retailing.
Mike Reyes, vice president of platform product management at Sabre, foresees one of the fallouts of the pandemic will be travel firms adopting tech to become better digital retailers.
And he says this is what underpinned Sabre’s exclusive partnership with search giant Google agreed before the pandemic and its focus as the crisis fades and travel looks to the future.
“We had a decision to make at Sabre,” Reyes said, “do we retrench or do we look ahead at what travel will look like coming out of this and what do we want to be.
“And we made a decision to make a bit of a transformation to help our customers be better retailers.
“With everyone sitting at home and no one flying, the pandemic emboldened us to say what do we think airlines will be looking for.”
Reyes was speaking to Travolution at the recent T2RL ‘Engage’ airline conference in London where he gave a keynote on Sabre’s vision of a digital retail revolution in travel.
He said with airlines’ historic data rendered worthless by the pandemic, the focus has to be on accelerating the use of Artificial Intelligence to be more attuned to customer needs.
Sabre decided before COVID to end its multi-source technology strategy and to work exclusively on Google as it retires its own legacy mainframe systems and shifts to the cloud.
Reyes said it chose Google as much as Google chose Sabre because, despite its own in-house travel IT expertise, the search giant needed a travel partner with a shared vision.
“We started thinking about what does it mean when we are fully off mainframe. What it was about was could we have a shared vision of a tech partner not just a tech vendor.
“They [Google] were trying to grow their market share. But they look at it in terms of how many companies in the next years are going to go through a transformation, getting out of legacy technology and moving towards cloud.
“The pie is going to be several times bigger than it is today. They chose to say they want strategic partners in a host of verticals, including travel, that they can invest in. For us Google were clearly the best in class.”
Although Sabre and Google are technically competitors – ITA software, that was acquired by the search giant for $700 million in 2011, still sits behind its Flights product – travel retailing remains a small part of its overall business.
