Sabre Introduces ‘Customer Personalization’ Solutions

Sabre Corp. is rolling out three new “customer personalization” solutions.

Customer Data Hub receives profiles from an airline’s loyalty program or creates them on the fly from the SabreSonic Customer Sales and Service system.

“We begin to score the profiles and create a unique identifier for the customer,” Stan Boyer, vice president of solutions marketing, said. The airline can respond to a search with an offer that it sets up in advance.

Personalized customer insights
Dynamic Retailer promotes ancillary growth by using personalized customer insights.

“During the shopping process, it detects any previous experience that the customer has with the airline and detects attributes about the customer’s past and current shopping,” Boyer said.

For example, a gold tier customer whose last flight was significantly delayed might be flying on a Wi-Fi-enabled aircraft.

To atone for the customer’s last experience, the carrier might offer free Wi-Fi. But that won’t go over well if the customer buys a branded fare that includes Wi-Fi, so the carrier can switch gears and offer a free lounge pass instead.

“Dynamic Retailer can be rolled out in any indirect channel,” Boyer said. Not surprisingly, the first such channel will be the Sabre GDS.

In addition, the solution will be compliant with IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) messaging standard. “We are working with IATA to get that certified,” Boyer said.

Changes in booking records
Customer Experience Manager can detect changes in data in a booking record and respond accordingly.

“Today, we gave 400 elements in a booking record and 200 in an e-ticket that can change,” Boyer said. A flight might be canceled or a customer might be upgraded, for example.

“As we detect changes, we can set up triggers and business rules,” he said. “The good news is that we have all the data so we can add scores to allow an airline to make a sensible offer.”

If a tier-level customer’s flight is canceled, the airline can reaccommodate the traveler automatically and add an upgrade or ancillary product as appropriate.

Airlines also can use Customer Experience Manager to increase revenues.

“Say an airline has two flights to the same city on Monday morning,” Boyer said. “The first flight is always full, the second is not.”

A particular flight may have a high number of passengers who booked early enough to get a relatively inexpensive fare. Several passengers may have requested upgrades, but the flight is full and there’s no chance they’ll get them.

The airline can send a message saying, “We see that you are on this flight and you are not going to get an upgrade. If you move to our later flight, we’ll upgrade you.”

A win-win
A customer with the flexibility to take the later flight will be happy. So will the airline’s revenue management team, because the vacated seat on the first flight can now be sold at a higher fare.

Sabre developed the solutions after it commissioned a study asking airlines what their top priorities were for the next decade. Aside from profitability, the carriers said they wanted to increase customer loyalty and improve the passenger experience, especially in irregular operations.

The No. 1 business problem they wanted to solve was getting a single view of the customer in the shopping experience.

Virgin America will be the first airlines to adopt all three of the solutions.