Sabre Travel Network has taken the wraps of its new Profiles management system saying it will help its users offer a more personalised service and cross-sell leisure travel to corporate clients.
Sabre Profiles launches promising a more personal service
Sabre Travel Network has taken the wraps of its new Profiles management system saying it will help its users offer a more personalised service and cross-sell leisure travel to corporate clients.
The system will replace the existing Stars profile management technology offering a more user-friendly interface fully integrated with Sabre’s existing travel agency tools.
Having been soft launched and beta-tested, including with UK customers, Profiles will now be rolled out globally to all customers through the rest of this year, 2012 and into 2013.
Chris Kroeger, senior vice president of Sabre Travel Network, said it will help agencies increase customer loyalty as part of the network’s wider Sabre Red project.
Using a graphical interface, Sabre Profiles allows agents to select the information to be uploaded into the distribution system’s Passenger Name Record (PNR)
Kroeger said: “With Profiles agencies are going to be able to add greater security structure and control over their customer data.
“It will ensure customer data is securely stored in compliance with PCI standards. Agencies will be able to define their structure to ensure data collection consistency.
“Plus they can control access to that information and what those who access it can do with it. This is an opportunity for agencies to store individuals’ corporate and leisure information in one profile.
“They can also create associations between corporate profiles and family members creating efficiencies when booking a collection of travellers or a family group.”
Profiles also offers an expanded search capability with the ability to search for clients by name, phone number or email among a other criteria. Information can also be shared via offline and mobile channels.
Kroeger said the development will benefit travelers who will be offered a more flexible, more personalised service.
He said corporate will be able to integrate Profiles with their human resources data and achieve greater integration between their travel preferences and the needs of the individual traveller.
Finally, he said the travel agent and travel management companies will be better able to provide their customers with the tailored offers they are increasingly looking for across a range of applications and to drive greater efficiencies.
In a demonstration of the new system for the media today Kathy Morgan, director of product marketing, showed how the system works seamlessly with travel agent administrator Scribe working in the background.
She showed in a dummy booking for car hire how a relevant discount for a particular corporate was automatically flagged up during the booking process.
Morgan said Profiles was specifically designed to be familiar to agents who currently use the Sabre system and user-friendly, with graphical check boxes and one click commands.
Profile templates can be created in which particular data fields are pre-selected and customer profiles viewed through various filters, including business and leisure, with a default filter selected.
Migration from Stars could happen as quickly as a couple of days or up to a month depending on how much cleaning up of data is required and how complex existing profiles structures are.
The migration will automatically map the information stored in Stars profiles and strip out that which is relevant for individual profiles in the new system.
Kroeger said: “We see an increasing demand for more personalization from our travel agency customers.
“We have seen as they have embraced and adopted CRM systems a desire to take customer data and turn it into marketing campaigns.
“Under the new system it will be easier for them to collect the relevant data to link profiles together making it easier for agencies to execute some of the personalized service they want to deliver.”
