Sabre Helps To Deliver Airline 2.0, Launches A Developer Platform
From a recent article in Forbes:
"Several years ago I undertook an extensive consulting arrangement in the airline and travel industry. The gig centered around looking at what the broader industry (airlines, their suppliers and their sales channel) could do to increase innovation and competitiveness. This is perhaps more important for the airline industry than other sectors – sky rocketing fuel costs, increased competition and a more discerning and demanding customer base all point to a need for a new approach towards the way airlines run – I like to call this concept Airline 2.0 and, to use a metaphor, it takes what Netflix or Uber have done to Blockbuster and cab companies respectively, and applies it to the broader airline industry.
Much of my work centered around empowering software developers to build new and creative solutions that would give airlines a competitive edge. Core airline systems still predominantly run on very old technology and hence don’t make it easy to build applications around them. I’m always amazed when flying that airline’s systems are so disconnected – the flight attendants have no overview of frequent flier data. Ticketing has no real connection to the in-air experience and every marketing initiative seems to be a completely siloed project. As I wrote when Virgin Airlines announced it was experimenting with Google glass:
This is exciting from a “wow, Google Glass is cool, Virgin Atlantic has always been cooler and now it’s even more so” perspective, but leaves so much value on the table. The real benefit to customers would be accrued if the core operating systems that airlines use (passenger manifests, frequent flier applications, promotional campaigns etc) were exposed via API and therefore able to be integrated with interesting applications.
So given all that, it was interesting to read some news recently from Sabre. Sabre is a company that focuses on delivering travel data to the industry. It powers the systems that many travel agencies use for example but it too was guilty of having a monolithic perspective to the way it delivers solutions. This appears to be changing with the announcement that the newly public listed company is creating a developer portal which gives third party developers access to some 150 Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), software hooks into core Sabre products.
The idea being that smart developers can use specific parts of Sabre data flows to create smart applications. And those data flows are significant, according to Sean Arena Chief Commercial Officer for Sabre, in the 1990s Sabre saw an average of 3,000 transactions per second using its data. Today that number has ballooned up to 99,000 transactions per second. All of that data is a fantastic opportunity for useful tools to be created – tools that personalize and contextualize the broader travel experience – buying, planning, searching. Many of these APIs are based around intelligent searching, allowing developers to build applications that offer far more refined and granular search options.
Of course the Sabre data only captures one part of the travel experience. Imagine this sort of intelligent searching alongside integrated data about an individual’s travel habits and history and integrated airline marketing initiatives. Sure giving me the best possible travel search result is useful, but it’s a prize also sought by others – Google GOOGL +0.84%, Expedia EXPE -0.19% and Travelport for example. Far more valuable would be a portal that not only offered these searching APIs, but also offered some airline-specific APIs as well.
There is huge necessity for the airline industry, a world of good examples to learn from and significant customer demand. Much of the travel experience today is broken (yes, flight service managers still carry a printed customer manifest list, printed on a dot matrix printer no less!) I’m hoping that the opportunities of airline 2.0 come sooner rather than later. Sabre’s developer portal is a good start, but it’s only a very small piece of the puzzle."
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