Sabre looks to disrupt travel industry with new offering powered by Google's AI
Sabre Corporation and Google are in the process of developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) driven technology platform to advance personalised travel.
The technology, known as Sabre Travel AI, includes Google's AI technology and advanced machine-learning capabilities to help customers in three key areas.
These are: to deliver relevant and personalised content more quickly, deliver personalised content that better meets the demands of today's traveller, and create expanded revenue and margin growth opportunities.
The company is integrating Sabre Travel AI into certain products in its existing portfolio, including the Sabre retail, distribution and fulfillment, with plans to bring those to market in early 2021.
Specifically, Sabre Travel AI capitalises on Google Cloud AI solutions and automated machine learning tools that sense, analyse and predict consumer behaviours, using real-time shopping information and travel-specific business insights.
This innovation is designed to enable airlines, agencies, corporations, hoteliers and other travel partners to improve their retailing and digital customer experience strategies, the company states.
By delivering the right offer, at the right time across all relevant channels, they will be positioned to deliver tailored personalisation to travelers that can drive higher conversion rates and build traveler loyalty, Sabre states.
Beyond retailing, customers will be able to enhance distribution strategies across all channels with the same unified approach and deploy these Travel AI powered solutions in airports or mobile apps.
Furthermore, it is expected that in the future, Sabre customers will be able to integrate their own proprietary solutions with Sabre's new Travel AI for greater differentiation.
In the short term, Sabre Travel AI will provide access to cloud-based, advanced technology tools to help prepare and store data sets, augment them with customer proprietary or other third party databases, test and learn with experimentation frameworks, develop and deploy proprietary machine learning models, understand model performance, and optimise and deploy new solutions in a scalable environment.
The company also stated that its strategic partners, such as Google, will not have the right to access or use any of the company's or its customer's data. How that data resides in Google Cloud is managed by Sabre.
Sabre Labs president Sundar Narasimhan says, "Sabre Travel AI is a game-changer. We are proud to be working with Google to build technologies that will seek to redefine the way travel companies do business, and turn the insights derived from analyses into repeatable, scalable operations.
"The development of Sabre Travel AI marks a milestone in our technology transformation and a significant step toward achieving our 2025 vision of personalised retailing."
Narasimhan says, "With the creation of Sabre Travel AI, we are rebuilding our platform on cloud-native, data-driven technology that can be integrated into the existing and future products that Sabre offers.
"We are combining Google Cloud's infrastructure, AI and machine-learning capabilities with Sabre's deep travel domain knowledge to create, not next, but third-generation solutions that we believe are smarter, faster and more cost effective - a first of its kind in travel.
Google Cloud president Rob Enslin also commented on the announcement.
He says, "Since the inception of our strategic relationship with Sabre, one of our goals has been to bring together the talent and technology of both our companies to create the future of travel.
"Sabre Travel AI perfectly represents Google Cloud's strategic vision to partner deeply with thought leaders in industry verticals to utilise Google Cloud's innovative technologies to transform and create industry firsts.
"Today's announcement is what we hope will be the first of many concepts generated from our partnership.
Moving forward, through its partnership with Google, Sabre plans to continue to innovate using Sabre Travel AI and launch more new retailing capabilities in the market beginning early 2021.
