Star Alliance uses Sabre’s tech to automate booking round the world flights

Star Alliance is to offer automated round the world and circle trip air fares for sale by agents through Sabre’s GDS.

Star Alliance is to offer automated round the world and circle trip air fares for sale by agents through Sabre’s GDS.

This follows Sabre creating a new industry standard for purchasing such fares in partnership with the Airline Tariff Publishing Company.

The new automated booking technology will help travel agents reduce the cost of selling the fares and aims to increase sales of these itineraries for carriers.

This Sabre technology provides a complete fare price to the agent for the passenger’s entire journey.

Previously, agents had to manually construct the fare after calculating the mileage and checking the fare conditions of a passenger’s journey when booking multi-destination itineraries.

Agencies will also benefit from reduced Agency Debit Memo costs (ADMs), which are sent by airlines when there is a discrepancy between the fare sold to the customer and the airline’s published price.

Sabre EMEA senior vice president, Harald Eisenaecher, said: “We are pleased that together with Star Alliance we can now offer a simpler way of booking and pricing round the world fares.

“We were keen to respond to industry demand to automate this process, and were proud to be the first GDS to introduce a new industry framework earlier in the year.

“Since then, we’ve had a hugely positive response to this new technology from our travel agent clients.

“This agreement further proves the industry’s need for the automation of these types of complex itineraries. We expect this to drive more bookings from agents of round the world fares.”

Horst Findeisen, commercial and business development vice president at Star Alliance, said: “Leveraging technology to simplify and accelerate complex processes is a key benefit which an alliance can provide.

“In this case, we now enable even more travel agents in even more markets to quickly and easily respond to customer wishes for round the world travel, which often can involve highly individualised and complicated routeings.”