Star Alliance offers round-the world fares via GDS

The Star Alliance has partnered with Sabre to offer its Round the World (RTW) and Circle Trip (CT) airfares through the GDS.

Earlier this year, Sabre teamed up with the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) to create a new industry standard for purchasing RTW and CT fares. This new automated booking technology will help travel agents sell these multi-country, multi-airline fares, without having to manually construct the itinerary and calculate the individual sectors.

Instead, Sabre will provide agents with a complete fare price for the passenger’s entire journey.

“We are pleased that together with Star Alliance we can now offer a simpler way of booking and pricing RTW fares,” said Harald Eisenaecher, senior vice president of EMEA for Sabre. “We were keen to respond to industry demand to automate this process, and were proud to be the first GDS to introduce a new industry framework earlier in the year.

“Since then, we’ve had a hugely positive response to this new technology from our travel agent clients. This agreement further proves the industry’s need for the automation of these types of complex itineraries. We expect this to drive more bookings from agents of RTW fares,” he added.

Horst Findeisen, Star Alliance’s vice president of commercial & business development, added; “We are pleased to be working with Sabre to open a further distribution channel through which our Round the World and Circle Fares can be easily booked and automatically priced.

“Leveraging technology to simplify and accelerate complex processes is a key benefit which an alliance can provide. In this case, we now enable even more travel agents in even more markets to quickly and easily respond to customer wishes for round the world travel, which often can involve highly individualised and complicated routings.”

Star Alliance’s 27 member airlines currently offer a network of more than 18,500 daily flights to 1,321 airports in 193 countries.

sourced:ttrweekly.com