Sabre
Holdings and Amadeus are planning to launch Moneydirect, a joint venture that will provide an industry solution
for secure, automated payment processing, clearing and reconciliation
for the travel and tourism industry.
  This announcement follows the filing made in August by the two
companies with the European Commission for antitrust approval for the
joint venture. An initial announcement was also made at that time.

  Moneydirect will focus on travel suppliers such as hotels, cruise
lines, tour operators, car rental companies, ferries, railways, and
travel intermediaries such as travel agencies and wholesalers. The
intent of the joint venture is to establish an industry standard
solution to improve and better meet the requirements of the travel
industry with payment efficiencies, increased automation, and improved
interoperability.

  “In a rapidly evolving industry, travel players are continually
looking for ways to streamline and improve their business,” said
Philippe Chereque, senior vice president, Corporate Strategy, Amadeus.
“We believe Moneydirect can help the industry significantly increase
efficiencies and reduce reliance on manual processes. All this can be
achieved on the cost effective and neutral Moneydirect payment
platform. Moneydirect will have the flexibility to handle any type of
payment, will have a high level of security, and the ability to
integrate with existing front and back office products with these
features. Moneydirect will provide a comprehensive industry solution
that will work in any part of the world.”

  “While Amadeus and Sabre compete in many areas, both companies saw
the tremendous opportunity to provide an industry standard where none
exists today,” said Greg Webb, chief marketing officer for Sabre
Holdings. “The companies have unprecedented scale as evidenced by our
technologies and business processes installed and integrated at
thousands of travel agencies around the world, all of which do
business with hotels, cruise lines, car rental companies, tour
operators, rail companies and other suppliers. This represents a
tremendous amount of cost and complexity today due to different
handling of money flows and associated data elements in each point of
sale, back-office application and with each trade partner. In addition
to the complexity this creates for travel industry suppliers and
travel agencies, there is also very little automation for the payment
processing. Because Moneydirect offers a solution to address this
complexity and inefficiency, we have received very positive reaction
to this new solution.”

  Moneydirect will integrate the existing financial instruments
already used by the travel industry into a best-in-class,
multi-channel, GDS-independent and neutral platform which will allow
users to effectively manage all aspects of their payment needs in a
flexible, easy-to-use solution.

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