Sabre Recognized as System Provider in IATA’s Airline Retailing Maturity Index

(17 May 2022, 09:39 +07)  Sabre has been recognized as a system provider for both airlines and travel sellers in the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA’s) Airline Retailing Maturity (ARM) index.

Designed to assess the maturity of industry players in the journey to airline retailing, the ARM index replaces the previous IATA New Distribution Capability (NDC) and ONE Order certifications and expands the scope of the program beyond technical standards to recognize the benefits of value chain collaboration and value creation.

Introduced in November 2021, the program is built on three pillars: Capabilities Verification to measure the technical abilities for shop, order, pay, settle, account, and set up; Partnerships Deployment to determine the scalability of NDC-enabled offers across the value chain; and Value Capture Compass to track potential value captured along the retail transformation journey.

Singapore Airlines A350-900 reg: 9V-SMH. Picture by Steven Howard of TravelNewsAsia.com

“Airline retailing means placing the customer at the center of the air travel shop/order/pay ecosystem. We are excited to see Sabre’s strong alignment with this vision as a recognized System Provider in the ARM index,” said Yanik Hoyles, IATA’s Director Distribution.

Sabre has a busy NDC roadmap laid out for the remainder of 2022:

Dynamic air pricing for NDC offers will become available with the recently launched Air Price IQ product within the Sabre Retail Intelligence suite, enabling airlines to optimize offers in real-time with market-leading machine learning and data analytics capabilities.

Support for exchanges will be added to the current cancel, void and refund capabilities, providing robust servicing functionality.

Radixx, which provides solutions for low cost carrier airlines, is expected to also become certified under the ARM index later this year as an airline IT provider.

“We are very proud of Sabre’s inclusion in the ARM index and we wholeheartedly welcome IATA’s move toward a more layered and multi-faceted view of airline retailing,” said Kathy Morgan, Vice President, Channel Delivery, Sabre Travel Solutions. “From the very beginning, we’ve approached NDC as a technical basis to deliver a more personalized traveler experience. We named our program “Beyond NDC” to signal a focus not only on ticking boxes on a technical capability checklist, but also on a longer-term retailing vision and the value that NDC contributes. Sitting at the crossroads of travel, we listen to our customers on both the supply and demand sides of our travel marketplace, integrate their feedback, and innovate across our portfolio so that our products scale end-to-end, not just for individual players in the ecosystem.”

Sabre is in discussions with more than 25 airlines about selling their NDC offers through its marketplace.

In addition to Singapore Airlines and Qantas – which combined are active in 50 markets and are starting to rollout their NDC content across North and South America – Sabre is actively engaged with Lufthansa Group, Qatar Airways and United Airlines, among others.

NDC offers from these airlines will be available in the coming months through Sabre’s Offer and Order APIs, agency point of sale, Sabre Red 360 and online booking tool, GetThere.

See also: Future of Airline Distribution and NDC - Exclusive HD Video Interview with Yanik Hoyles, IATA.