A new global partnership between Luxury Escapes and Sabre offering improved and expanded options for travel advisors has been implemented this month, LATTE can reveal.
The pact between the Aussie-founded holiday package specialist with Sabre has allowed Luxury Escapes to rebuild and enhance both its flight only and flight-accommodation bundling platform from the ground up, says Chris Malina, General Manager, Flights & Cruises for Luxury Escapes. (Malina has been the head of Luxury Escapes’ Flights department since July 2023. His remit was expanded to Cruise last month).
“We have now purposefully built the right infrastructure to scale, enabling us to unlock new future features and capabilities,” Malina said. “We are talking about purpose-built modern APIs to support greater fare and route options with our flight bookings via legacy GDS and NDC content.”
The Luxury Escapes (LE) and Sabre teams behind the project: Pictured below from left are: Justin Hannaford, Sabre; Sriram Shankar, LE; Dinesh Johnisaac, Sabre; Fiona Richards, Sabre; Chris Malina, LE; Simon Roll, Sabre; Susan Atike, Sabre; Dulaj Pathirana, LE and Man Jayaprakash, LE.
Malina said the partnership with Sabre will also provide access to a superior multi-source cache that supports GDS, NDC and Low Cost Carrier content in a single unified search, allowing scalability.
That in turn offers “live and reliable pricing and a second-to-none customer self-servicing capability that improves our customers experience with improved automation and offline efficiency and productivity.”
Malina told LATTE that expanding Luxury Escapes’ bundling and package reach “is on our roadmap.”
“Merchandising our hotel offering via the GDS is something we’re exploring,” he revealed.
“However with our new tech and features, our immediate focus is to ensure we’re improving the work flow of our own Travel Advisors by offering them a superior airline trailing interface platform that offers both personalised/dynamic pricing and a single shopping source that integrates, air, hotel and cruise and other travel related content to help simplify their booking experience and improve customer service,” Malina said.
Luxury Escapes and Sabre have signed a 7-year deal for the tie-up. It spans Australia, New Zealand, the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong.
“We see Sabre as a long-term strategic enabler with not only growing Australia, but our global distribution with a view to expand into other markets. We felt a long-term deal provides us with stability and the ability to fully leverage Sabre’s technology suite of product.”
“We embarked on the journey with Sabre to not be the biggest, but to simply be the best and we feel that the Sabre partnerships provide Luxury Escapes our best option to make that happen,” Malina concluded.
