Skift Take
Lufthansa Group has led a years-long uprising by large airlines against the tech middlemen Sabre, Amadeus, and Travelport. This new pact validates a changed commercial, technological, and marketing strategy at Sabre under CEO Sean Menke in recent years.
Lufthansa Group and Sabre said on Wednesday they had agreed on high-level principles for a new airline distribution agreement. The public announcement offered few details, but the existence of a deal itself signaled the end of long-running commercial and legal battles between the largest airline group in Germany and the largest travel distribution company in the U.S.
The agreement said that agencies in 2021 would be able to access, book, pay for, and edit such offers via Sabre, the first of the global distribution systems to access Lufthansa Group's next-generation content, including so-called continuous pricing.
Until now, Lufthansa made its next-generation offers available only to selected partners, such as Concur and Egencia, that agreed to use its preferred technical methods. Agencies saw some different fares and saw those offers displayed differently when connecting via Lufthansa's agency-direct systems instead of through the classic reservation systems of Sabre and its distribution rivals Amadeus and Travelport.
"After the planned launch next year, the diversified NDC program will give Sabre-connected travel agencies globally the ability to access Lufthansa Group airlines’ content through the Sabre marketplace and by signing up to one of the two available commercial models for NDC," Sabre said in a statement.
The pact ends months-long haggling. In May Sabre had ended a distribution deal with the airline group, which includes Austrian
