Sabre develops smart, scalable retail engine for travel industry

Sabre Corporation, a software and technology company involved in the global travel industry, is working with Google to launch its first product powered by proprietary Sabre Travel AI technology.

The travel-based Sabre Smart Retail Engine will launch in early 2021 and will be powered by artificial intelligence (AI) technology and advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities. The development of Sabre’s Smart Retail Engine came together through its relationship with Google.

"We are excited to bring this intelligent retail engine to market as part of our offer management strategy, marking another step towards achieving our 2025 vision of delivering truly personalized travel," said Wade Jones, chief product officer at Sabre. "By bringing together some of the brightest minds from Google and Sabre, we are accelerating the delivery of this smart and scalable retailing engine that we believe will enable customers to deliver personalized offers to their customers, better serving the needs of today's traveler, while unlocking more value per passenger boarded."

The Sabre Smart Retail Engine combines Sabre's offer management and customer segmentation abilities with Google's powerful merchandising solution. It’ll use real-time shopping data, content and AI/ML-based decision support models to create personalized offer bundles.

The Smart Retail Engine technology will dynamically price travel offers using customer segmentation techniques. Its bundles can include seats, baggage, and other ancillaries. It’ll eventually also include rental cars, hotel stays and other third-party offers.

Sabre Travel AI works with Google Cloud AI solutions and automated ML tools to identify, analyze and predict consumer behaviors, which are based on real-time shopping and travel-specific business insights. This will help travel clients quickly create relevant and personalized content, meet traveler demands and create more revenue opportunities.

"We are pleased to be working side-by-side with Sabre to bring innovative, industry-first technologies to the travel space," said Ravi Simhambhatla, managing director, digital transformation officer – travel & transportation, Google Cloud. "Today's announcement, as well as Sabre Travel AI, are what we hope will be the first of many concepts generated from our partnership."