Northstar

www.travelweekly-asia.com | 17 TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY 3. Hotels welcome intelligent merchandising to drive personalised retailing • WHO IS IT FOR: Hotels Hotels are being equipped with tools to help drive ancillary sales, a move that could emulate the success that airlines have enjoyed. For too long, hotels lagged behind the more advanced retailing capabilities that airlines adopted to grow ancillary sales, which hit a forecast of US$93 billion in 2018, according to a PhocusWire report last November. At STX, Sabre conducted a live demonstration of its SynXis Intelligent Retailing solution that enables hoteliers to cross-sell hotel rooms at other points of purchase ranging from tours and experiences to other ancillaries. Sabre's sales engineer Jeff Henley said this makes it possible to retail any product or services, from helicopter tours to clothing. The platform is powered by machine learning, which is capable of refining product offers that are presented to guests in real-time as they input their selections from room type to floor selection. This means that hotels could use it to make offers for high-margin ancillaries in a more targeted and accurate manner. Sabre is currently working with Hong Kong-based Langham Hotels to pilot the platform this year, following which it will test the platform over the next two quarters. Sabre expects to bring this capability to the wider marketplace by 2020. • WHY IT MATTERS: Hotels stand to tap into a pool of highly- engaged potential guests who are researching and booking related products and services. 4. Increasing cloud support and driving 'sub-second' response times • WHO IS IT FOR: Airlines, Hotels and Agencies The migration to cloud-based systems is gaining traction in the travel industry, helping to push computational capabilities to support increasingly complex transactions. Sabre has spent the last two years peeling out functions from its mainframe and migrating it to the cloud platform across five processing locations across North America in order to make its systems "more globally distributed" and closer to its customers worldwide. Next year, it will add processing locations in Europe. These infrastructure changes help Sabre support over 600 million shopping requests daily, said Kathy Morgan, Sabre's vice president of NDC. "In today's world of GDS shopping, it's a sub-second response time. In an NDC world, we are seeing something slightly longer than that. By introducing capabilities like streaming, in which a set of results are presented according to the user's preferred timeline, we are able to isolate some of the limitations," said Morgan. • WHY IT MATTERS: Transactions are increasingly complicated. Cloud platforms help to streamline system response times, a crucial help when small delays of half or a quarter of a second can add up. T o fully understand how the Sabre Red 360 can benefit travel agents, I opted for a crash course on the flagship interface and had a brief 30-minute stint as a travel agent. Sabre's product marketing manager Sierra Dunaway began the demonstration by using the graphical interface to start a search process – or shopping – by entering basic search criteria such as travel dates, destination and other information. Since Sabre rolled out the new graphical interface in 2017, it has built in additional features, including displaying upfront branded fares, seat map and amenities that mimicked what most travellers see on consumer travel website. In the results page, three columns showed fixed categories of fares per category, such as Basic Economy, Main Cabin and First Class offered by each airline, making it easier to compare prices across airlines. Enhancements such as more refined search qualifiers, add-in tools like filtering and map view, and end-to-end workflow will be added in the ensuing months. Agents will be able to provide multiple personalised offers to travellers via a sidebar tool called Trip Proposal, which enables a quick capture of the available travel offers in a neatly formatted document that can be sent to their clients. "We're seeing an acceleration in adoption on SabreRed360, and we're investing to bring this more aggressively into our Asian markets, starting with launch activities from July," said Brett Burgess, Sabre Travel Network's senior vice president – product management. It will roll out these advanced features to customers on the legacy 1b Abacus platform, which is used by 40% of agents in Asia Pacific. "What we're finding is that the intelligence we've built into SabreRed360… is increasing the agents' efficiency," said Burgess. Air shopping results are categorised according to brand fares and indicators such as fare history and trends. I was a travel agent for a day FAST FACTS • In a usability study, Sabre found that standardising and structuring the content display helped agents reach a faster booking decision by 30% . • With the benefit of pre- populated traveller data, insights and shortcut tools, even agents with lesser industry experience are able to complete a given booking process 26% faster on the graphical interface of Sabre Red 360 than a highly- proficient veteran agent on a native "blue screen format".

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