Sabre Travel Network Enhances Sabre Cruises Booking Tool to Offer Leisure Agents Increased

By: Lifestyle News

Sabre Travel Network announced today new enhancements to its highly efficient cruise shopping and booking tool, Sabre Cruises, specifically tailored to boost business performance for luxury and home-based travel agents.

“No matter what travel segment agents target, Sabre Travel Network is committed to being there both with the technology and services as well as the training and information about the industry they need to keep their customers satisfied and ensure a successful business,” said Lee Rosen, president of TRAMS and vice president of the Sabre Travel Network leisure segment. “We believe, and feedback from the agency community confirms, that part of the path to continued relevance of the agency community and success of their business is industry knowledge, coupled with appropriately leveraged technology, marketing services and networking opportunities.

The latest enhancements announced today focus on leisure offerings for cruise bookings, which continue to gain in appeal, as well as the number of offerings from the cruise industry. Rosen’s remarks were made as part of the 2007 Luxury Travel Expo and Home Based Travel Agent Expo and Conference in Las Vegas this week.

The new enhancements to Sabre Cruises bring value to agents by improving online cruise shopping capabilities, comprehensive passenger services, and integrated customer relationship management.

Online Cruise Shopping

With the new features to Sabre Cruises agents can now:
Sort through search results by port of embarkation,
See sailings that only match their request,
Book an available category and, if a category is sold out, select up to three waitlist categories all in the same booking,
Easily look up past passengers’ frequent cruiser numbers,
Determine alternate passenger category pricing based on changing factors such as a passenger’s age, insurance selection, origination city, transportation or number of passenger in a cabin.

Comprehensive Passenger Services

Sabre has also added new capabilities at the passenger level. Sabre Cruises allows agents to book additional trip components on a passenger-by-passenger basis, including:
Insurance,
Cruise line air add-on, and
Pre-trip and post-trip packages.

Integrated Customer Relationship Management

Sabre Cruises will support Live Connect from TRAMS for all ClientBase agents in the coming weeks.
The Live Connect feature will provide a direct connection to the Sabre Cruises booking engine, with a two-way transfer of information. With Live Connect, in one click, a user can automatically log in to Sabre Cruises, use the client’s profile to make Sabre Cruises reservations, and import reservation details back into the client’s Res Card in ClientBase. Agents marketing cruises to their existing clients have the potential to grow their repeat business rates from the average 20 percent to more than 80 percent through ClientBase.

Now more than ever, travel agents have the ability to find the right cruise to fit their clients’ preferences and budgets. Sabre Cruises gives travel agents direct access to 12 cruise lines all from a single source, offering multiple cabin categories including suites for luxury travelers. Serving luxury travelers is especially important, because they not only spend more on cruises, but cruise more often. According to Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), luxury cruisers cruise nearly three times as frequently as average cruisers (9.1 times compared to 3.4 times). Sabre Cruises saves home-based and luxury agents time in servicing frequent VIP clients.

“We are committed to making travel agents’ jobs easier by developing and delivering products to help them improve productivity, as well as increase sales,” Rosen continued. “Our goal is to meet agents’ needs before the needs become problems. We’re all about new horizons and new opportunities for all agents large and small.”

Attendees at the Luxury Travel Show and Home Based Travel Agent Expo and Conference will have opportunities to see these enhancements and learn more about the comprehensive leisure offerings in Sabre’s exhibition spaces:

For the Luxury Travel Expo, booth #459

For the Home Based Travel Agent Expo, booth #313 for Trip Tailor, Sabre Cruises and VacationStudio; booth #414 for TRAMS Marketing Alliance; and booth #412 for Nexion

Sabre Cruises is available free of charge to Sabre Connected travel agents. It is also available on the VacationStudio tab of MySabre and www.vacationstudio.com, the travel agent's one-stop source for commissionable cruises, custom packages and vacations from their favorite tour packagers and more.

In 2008, there will be even more opportunities to participate and learn about ways agents can leverage technology and marketing services to adapt to the ever-changing and challenging travel industry landscape. One of the highlights of the year will be the TRAMS-sponsored Technology and Marketing University (TMU) 2008 to be held at the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, April 22 – 25. With over 80 interactive workshops and breakout sessions, over 60 travel companies and suppliers presenting, and over 800 travel professionals in attendance, the Technology and Marketing University has grown to be the best thing that happens in Vegas.

About Sabre Travel Network

Sabre Travel Network, a Sabre Holdings company, provides the most comprehensive end-to-end solutions for corporate and leisure travel. The Sabre GDS is the foundation for these solutions, providing a ready-built efficient marketplace that connects travel suppliers, including hundreds of airlines and thousands of hotels, with more than 50,000 travel agency locations. Currently, Sabre collectively handles over 70 percent of the BTN 100 bookings.

Key brands of Sabre Travel Network include GetThere, for corporate travel reservation technology; Nexion, a host agency; SynXis, for hotel reservation management, distribution and technology services; TRAMS, mid- and back-office solutions and marketing services for travel agencies; and TRAMS Marketing Alliance (TMA), a marketing promotions services for leisure travel agencies. Sabre Travel Network also markets TripTailor Vacations, a travel wholesaler providing dynamic packaging for the travel agency marketplace.

Sabre Holdings connects people with the world’s greatest travel possibilities by retailing travel products and providing distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry.