Sabre Holdings
is timing its latest Scandinavian growth initiative for this week’s TUR travel show in Sweden.  The company will tell existing and potential customers that it plans to introduce to the Scandinavian market its Turbo Sabre booking tool for high volume travel agencies. 
The Windows-based product can be customised to meet an agency’s specific requirements, and will be used by Sabre to support its growth ambitions in the region.

Sabre has expanded its presence in the Scandinavian market significantly over the past two years, doubling its booking share to approximately 14 percent.  The company’s acting managing director for the Nordic region, Kath Webster, said the introduction of Turbo Sabre would help support the company’s “aggressive” growth strategy here.

Although Turbo Sabre has traditionally been used by Swedish agency Flex Resor, the product has now been specially adapted for Scandinavia to enable more widespread use.  It is also used by thousands of travel agents in European agencies, including P&O Business Travel in the UK and McFlight in Germany. Its deployment in Scandinavia is a sign of the company’s intention to court some of the region’s larger names in business and leisure travel.

“Much of our recent growth has come from our ability to offer local content, combined with a feeling that the Scandinavian market has long been dominated by a competitor global distribution system (GDS) which has not focused on customer service,” Webster said.

“The introduction of our high volume booking tool will allow us to exploit this sentiment more fully, and make further inroads in this region.”

In addition to its customisable format, Turbo Sabre gives agents easy and fast access to customer and fare information stored on local databases.  It integrates with a wide variety of content sources, including 32-bit databases - the type of database commonly used throughout the travel industry.

The booking platform is Web-enabled and features an integrated Internet window, which lets agents access information simultaneously from both the Sabre GDS and the Web.  A graphical Flight Finder tool helps travel agents book flights based on fare information.  This streamlines significantly the process of finding and booking a flight.

“By harnessing the speed of Turbo Sabre, and combining it with the huge pool of information on the Internet, agents can vastly improve their performance and customer service,” said Helena Popp, managing director of Flex Resor/BIG Travel, Sweden.

“Turbo Sabre was developed to help travel agencies increase their productivity and profitability.  It is an information technology tool that enables travel agencies to compete more effectively,” Popp said.

Related stories on ITN:
(12/09/2002) Sabre Continues Growth in Scandinavia

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