The ongoing pandemic has caused a significant shift in the travel ecosystem requiring all players to adapt and respond quickly to the challenges presented. Travel Agencies around the world have implemented measures to drive workflow efficiency while managing customers canceling and postponing travel plans.
Technology solutions play a crucial role in this scenario, helping agencies automate manual processes and extend their web reach by making offerings and touchless services available online. These technologies will continue having a positive impact beyond COVID-19.
Sabre application programming interfaces (APIs) enable all travel related actions such as Air, Car, Hotel, PNR, Merchandising, Ticketing, Queue, Rail, Cruise and Miscellaneous services, but customers need the right APIs with the right business logic to meet their needs and drive their operations accordingly.
Check below how travel agencies are using Sabre APIs for more flexible, integrated and intelligent automated solutions to respond to these challenging times.
CVC Corp is the largest travel group in Latin America. Headquartered in Santo André, São Paulo, Brazil, its distribution network consists of more than 1,400 exclusive stores nationwide and 8,000 accredited travel agents. The group has been acquiring several agencies in Brazil and recently expanded their business to Argentina.
Before the pandemic, ticket refunds and exchanges were a time-consuming manual process, by specific internal department experts in reissue, and only after a request was made by the CVC (tour operator) stores.
With the high volume of refunds and exchanges occurring due to the pandemic, CVC accelerated a project that was already in their pipeline, to use the Sabre Automated Exchanges, Automated Refunds and Exchange Shopping APIs to automate the exchanges process available online in their own internal application for CVC stores. This will allow them to automatically process voluntary and involuntary ticket changes in a faster and more efficient way.
The development teams from Sabre and CVC are jointly working hard to launch this automated solution as soon as possible.
In the meantime, Sabre has been providing daily reports automatically generated by Sabre Data Suite informing all CVC PNRs that had involuntary change requests with HX, UC, UN and TK segment statuses. This is allowing CVC to better manage these reservations and take the necessary actions on time.
"Typical manual exchanges contain complex fare calculation and manual input. By automating the exchanges process with Sabre APIs, we will reduce operational costs with a more efficient workflow.
I personally received a daily report sent by Sabre Data Suite with all PNRs with change requests from the airlines. This allowed us to keep control of all actions required and work intelligently by focusing and prioritizing these changes.
Sabre Data Suite also helped us identify our passengers located in different parts of the world and approach them with flight options to bring them back home", said Fábio Belém, Air Distribution Manager for CVC Corp.
Costamar is a consolidator headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with offices located in the United States and Latin America (Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia). They offer a wide range of travel services to agencies around the word.
At the beginning of March, when the pandemic started in Peru, Costamar recognized the need to make automated exchanges available on its website to help travel agencies and passengers reissue their tickets online via costamar.com. During the initial quarantine period, Costamar started to implement the GetReservation, Exchange Shopping, Automated Exchangesand AirTicket APIs.
This implementation allowed Costamar to provide an efficient solution and streamline response times to their customers.
"Now the agencies and passengers we serve can perform exchanges directly in our website, making it faster, automatically and with greater autonomy. The support offered by the Sabre experts was essential to develop the right solution, according to our requirements", said Jonathan Ruiz Ganoza, Commercial Director.
Be Fresh is the largest online travel agency in South Asia with more 120 Travel Consultants spread across 15 offices in different locations of Bangladesh. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they faced several challenges due to the increased volume of cancellations and exchanges. These were difficult to manage due to the number or manual processes and lack of some automation in the most critical operations. Recently, in April 2020, they decided to use Sabre Automation Hub to radically redesign their service model and improve their ability to handle airline bookings with a drastic reduction of manual processes and potential errors. More than 120 Travel Consultants and 500+ agents were then trained on the new products with the result of agency productivity being enhanced, at least 20% time saved on refund, reduce nbr of ADMs from airlines by 40%.
“Sabre Automation Hub has helped us in bringing in Product and Cost efficiencies in our business. Prior to implementation, we faced a lot of challenges in cancellations and refunds due to the manual processes. Automation of processes has helped us overcome our challenges and bring in smooth operations", said Md. Shamsul Islam, FCA Chairman.
Mundo Joven started as a travel agency focused in a niche market of young travelers, teachers and students looking for international camps and affordable activities around the world. Today, Mundo Joven has +44 branches in Mexico, Central America and Spain, plus a Call Center.
With the current COVID 19 situation, they dedicated resources to work hand in hand with Sabre experts to accelerate underway projects and implement Sabre solutions. One main objective was to launch a new version of their webpage with an improved booking engine to provide an enhanced customer experience and reduce costs.
Using Sabre APIs, Mundo Joven launched a new web page at the end of April, allowing a shift in focus to call center operations, with a commercial strategy based on web presence complementing their physical offices.
The agency will continue working to implement intelligent solutions using Sabre technology to offer personalized experiences to their end travelers, improving quality control and getting staff better trained to offer outstanding services to their customers.
"Sabre is always sharing best practices, expertise, technology and advices so we achieve our business goals. Our webpage functionalities are much more friendly now, with a very robust booking engine so our travelers can self-service and have a great customer experience. We launched a campaign at the beginning of the pandemic to invite travelers to postpone their trips, as opposed to cancel them, achieving a 90% success rate. This protected us from a significant cash flow impact and now, with these enhanced solutions implemented, we are better prepared for the recovery", said Jordi Llorens, CEO.
