When COVID-19 started, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C) issued new mandates to airlines regarding the capturing of new customer data upon entry in to the United States. In less than 24 hours, Sabre helped airlines flying in to the U.S. be compliant with this mandate, allowing non-residents to enter the country successfully.
Sabre initially enabled this solution for 16 airlines:
| Aeroflot | Etihad Airways | LATAM Airlines Ecuador |
| Aerolineas Argentinas | Hawaiian Airlines | Silver Airways |
| Aeroméxico | JetBlue Airways | Virgin Australia |
| Air Serbia | LATAM Airlines Group | WestJet |
| Alaska Airlines | LATAM Argentina | |
| Cayman Airways | LATAM Brazil |
Effective February 7, 2020, the C.D.C. published an interim rule requiring airlines to collect and provide to the C.D.C certain data regarding non-resident passengers arriving from foreign countries. This data, including detailed contact information, was collected for the purposes of public health education, treatment and other reasons such as contact tracing. The rule remains in effect throughout the duration of the COVID-19 outbreak.
“In less than 24 hours, the Sabre team was able to respond to the new C.D.C. mandates, ensuring compliancy for our airlines and travel continuity for their passengers.” - Ahmed Naeem, Director, Sabre Order Management solutions
Within 24 hours, Sabre responded to the C.D.C rule by enabling new data fields for customer information capture within back end messaging and every Sabre point of sale, including agent interfaces and airline.com websites.
By using technology (instead of paper forms), these airlines were able to efficiently and accurately capture this information within the Passenger Name Record (PNR) inside of SSCI, which can be queried or accessed for at least 280 days.
This solution was activated for 16 host airlines flying in to the United States at the time of the ruling. Each airline has benefitted from government compliancy with little to no impact to the overall passenger experience.
