It's hardly an accident that Tripadvisor is transitioning toward a direct-to-consumer business model after years of Google's hotel-comparison search eating into Tripadvisor's business.
Opportunities are ahead for those travel and hospitality companies that build the right products and platforms to address the needs of distributed workforces. Sabre's Google partnership certainly gives it a headstart.
Battling huge losses, and ongoing travel restrictions in Europe, Amadeus' decision to team up with the technology titan could pay off — but the race is on to deliver something tangible as rival Sabre gets to work with Google.
It must be heartening to Sabre to win Louvre, Europe's second-largest hotel group, as a customer of its central reservation system. But Sabre didn't notch significant hotel enterprise wins in recent pre-Covid years. So it will need to sign other hotel groups in 2021 to sustain momentum.
Airlines need to shift from forecasting models that rely primarily on historical data to ones that analyze real-time demand. That's how Amazon and other e-commerce companies handle pricing. No wonder travel tech players PROS, Amadeus, Sabre, and Flyr spy an opportunity.
In Skift's top travel stories this week, Sri Lanka is reinventing its tourism future, airlines and global distribution systems made peace, Google faced a bevy of lawsuits, an airline launched in the middle of the pandemic, and Hilton proved that mergers aren't the only way to grow.
The surcharges may be disappearing, but the pressure will be on travel agencies to keep up with the airlines, and passengers may ultimately be left picking up the tab.
2020 has been a year like no other for hotels. How will they adapt their approach moving forward? In this new insights deck, we investigate how hospitality distribution best practices are evolving for a new era.
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.