Sabre Provides An Early Look At Its New Agency Desktop

A preview of Sabre Red Workspace. Photo: Sabre.

Sabre Corp. offered a preview of the new version of Sabre Red Workspace, its travel agency desktop, at its Travel Technology Exchange in Miami. 

Sabre will begin upgrading travel agents to the new solution early next year. 

Sean Menke, president of Sabre Travel Network, said the desktop, developed on Sabre’s merchandising platform, will be “a great enabler” of airline merchandising, moving opportunities forward for both airlines and travel agents.  

Among the new features is a Decision Support Bar that provides agents with market data and intelligence on fare trends and range, travel seasonality and alternate airports.  

It will enable agents to advise on the best time to book, predict the best days to travel or offer airport options that are depicted on an interactive map, according to Richard Caulder, principal, strategic customer engagements. 

Those enhancements come courtesy of integration of Sabre Dev Studio application program interfaces (APIs). 

Other new features include an improved capability to mark up net or consolidator fares more easily, and advanced low fare shopping tools that have been used by online agencies for years. “We are bringing that power to the agent,” Caulder said. 

Wade Jones, senior vice president of marketing and strategy, said the “consumer-grade” user experience offered by the new version has “turned things upside down.” The older version was “designed for the product. The new version was designed for the experience.” 

The latest Sabre Red Workspace reflects a new “platform” mindset, evident throughout the Sabre Corp. business units.  

Rather than add on layers and layers of code, creating the dreaded “spaghetti effect,” Sabre Travel Network’s core GDS sits at the center of the platform. Sabre has opened up the platform to allow developers to create new applications for it, Jones said. 

Experienced agents – those who grew up with cryptic codes that required a lot of training – have not been left behind.  The previous version of Sabre Red Workspace offered two presentation layers: the command-driven blue screen or the graphical interface. 

The difference in the new version is that it is “100% backward compatible,” Caulder said. “Even in the graphical environment, you can still use the native commands.” 

Jones said the new workspace also takes into account how suppliers want to represent their products. “They don’t want a bifurcated product for the direct or indirect channel,” he said. They want a “holistic” representation of their product, regardless of the channel in which it is viewed.