With its AI-driven platform, Sabre is helping travel management firms simplify operations and deliver more personalised, seamless journeys for business travellers.
Guest column
By Brett Thorstad, Vice President, Agency Sales & Airline Distribution, APAC, Sabre
Expectations placed on Travel Management Companies (TMCs) have never been higher. Travellers want flexibility, personalisation and safety. Corporates want cost control, visibility and compliance. Meanwhile, TMCs are caught in the middle, navigating a fragmented content landscape while trying to deliver seamless experiences. To tackle this complexity, at Sabre, we believe technology can act as a bridge and lead the way for every stakeholder.
Our integrated ecosystem connects air, hotel, ground transport and more through a unified marketplace powered by Sabre APIs and underpinned by systemic artificial intelligence (AI). This is not just about access; it is about relevance. By harmonising traditional and low-cost carrier offers with industry-leading New Distribution Capability (NDC) and lodging content, we enable TMCs to deliver richer, more personalised options without compromising duty of care or operational efficiency.
Content fragmentation, however, remains a significant challenge. A recent Sabre-commissioned global study found that 91 per cent of agencies use four or more booking systems, with half managing seven or more API integrations. This complexity increases costs and strains resources. While direct airline connections have a role within the ecosystem, further Sabre analysis shows they can introduce more complexity than clarity.
Promises of cheaper fares and richer content often fall short, leaving buyers with fragmented service, inconsistent experiences and scalability challenges. Our response is SabreMosaic™ Travel Marketplace — a multi-source content platform that consolidates disparate data into a single, intelligent stream, empowering agents to serve travellers better, faster and smarter. This approach ensures corporate buyers gain full visibility, consistent traveller experiences and scalable infrastructure without the operational burden of managing dozens of individual airline connections.
Looking ahead to 2026, agentic AI will mark the next major shift. Sabre is developing agentic-ready APIs that allow autonomous systems to act on behalf of travellers, with the ability to book flights, secure hotel rooms and even file expense reports. These APIs connect to Sabre’s proprietary Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which draws on one of the richest data sets in travel. Spanning more than 50 petabytes, this depth enables smarter and faster decisions across the entire travel journey.
Consider a disruption proxy agent that waits on hold with an airline, rebooks a flight, processes payment and updates a traveller’s calendar without manual intervention. Or a hotel operations agent that confirms late arrivals and arranges oat milk for breakfast. These are not hypotheticals. Sabre is already in beta with select customers, validating real-world use cases, with plans to expand to more developers and organisations.
Sabre’s AI whitepaper, Chat as the new influencer: From conversations to clicks, forecasts a shift in how travel is discovered, personalised and booked. While generative AI chatbots demonstrate potential, agentic AI has the ability to remove friction between traveller intent and fulfilment. Conversational commerce powered by agentic AI represents a new paradigm, with the potential to redefine the traveller journey and unlock growth across the industry.
In short, Sabre is anticipating industry shifts and shaping what comes next. Through intelligent APIs, modular platforms and agentic AI, we are helping TMCs move from fragmented systems to fluid, connected experiences at scale.
(Views expressed are the author’s own. The publication may or may not subscribe to them.)
