Sabre Corporation, a global technology provider to the travel and tourism industry, has partnered with leading global airline association Star Alliance to offer automated Round the World (RTW) and Circle Trip (CT) airfares through its global distribution system (GDS).

Earlier this year, Sabre announced its partnership with the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) to create a new industry standard for purchasing RTW and CT fares. The new automated booking technology will help travel agents reduce the cost of selling RTW and CT products, which, in turn, will increase sales of these itineraries for carriers.

This new Sabre technology provides a complete fare price to the agent for the passenger’s entire journey.  Previously, when booking multi-destination RTW itineraries for travellers, agents had to manually construct the fare after calculating the mileage and checking the fare conditions of a passenger’s journey.  Agencies will also benefit from reduced Agency Debit Memo costs (ADMs), sent by airlines when there is a discrepancy between the fare sold to the customer by the agency and the airline’s published price. 

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

Horst Findeisen, vice president commercial and business development at Star Alliance, said: “We are pleased to be working with Sabre to open a further distribution channel through which our Round the World and Circle Fares can be easily booked and automatically priced. 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 individualized and complicated routings.” – TradeArabia News Service