Tech Tools Help Optimize Air Agreements

Sabre and Amadeus continue to develop technology that helps travel agencies and their corporate customers get the most out of preferred supplier air agreements.

Sabre Travel Network’s Contract Optimization Services, designed to drive preferred air carrier sales, has been expanded to other continents following its North American launch late last year. Several agencies are participating in a pilot program in Europe.

Part of the Sabre Red solution, Contract Optimization Services helps travel agencies and their corporate customers manage multiple, overlapping air supplier contracts so they can reach their volume commitments more easily.

An agency may have four or five airline supplier agreements with multiple sales targets for overlapping sets of markets. When an agent is in the process of making a booking, Contract Optimization Services analyzes all the possible city pair, carrier and point-of-sale combinations to identify those that will enable the agency to reach its performance goals.

The solution includes three integrated components. A sales planning component evaluates supplier deals and determines ideal sales targets at the city pair or flight level. A content customization capability allows customers to tailor their displays, reflecting market and customer-specific objectives. And a reporting and analysis component tracks performance on the terms and goals for each airline supplier agreement, including daily alerts on big opportunities.

Amadeus Air Preference Manager
Amadeus has had preferencing capabilities for some time via the Amadeus Travel Preferences Manager tool, which is available to all users of the Amadeus Selling Platform.  In the next few months, Amadeus will roll out an even more advanced tool – the Amadeus Air Preferences Manager – that will focus specifically on air.

The new tool will allow agencies to display providers based on different or more detailed criteria, including profitability to the company and/or agency. The current tool can accommodate the desire to bias air availability to either agency, company or a traveler’s preference. 

Users can set the activation of Travel Preferences Manager as a default setting, enabling a corporate customer to mandate the use of policies and preferences. Agents can build the most basic to the most advanced travel policy rules for their clients, with options such as cabin, class, elapsed flying time, air vendor, hotel vendor, car vendor and city pairs.

Amadeus also allows users to build policies for a company or traveler based on the reason for the trip and to define different policies for clients within the same company based on their “position” within the company. When no company policy or traveler policy exists, Travel Preferences Manager will alert the user to the agency’s preferred vendors.  It also can be used in leisure-oriented agencies with many walk-in clients.