Sabre Travel Network has confirmed it is building the world’s first B2B application store for the travel industry.

Scheduled to open in the coming months, the Sabre Red App Centre will be the first online marketplace to connect travel buyers, including travel agencies, travel management companies and leisure operators, with third party developers.

Sabre Travel Network is a global travel technology company, delivering innovative solutions that make it easy for travel buyers to shop, book and manage travel, and allow travel suppliers to effectively reach buyers through Sabre’s global distribution system (GDS).

“The Sabre Red App Centre will open up a new world of possibilities for the travel industry and bring endless opportunities for creative and original applications to be brought to the market quickly,” said Greg Webb, president of Sabre Travel Network.

“Our agency customers will be able to improve their business and deliver enhanced services for travelers by tapping into the collective creativity of Red App developers from all over the world.”

The Red App Centre will include Sabre-certified Red Apps built by third party developers, travel buyers and Sabre.

The Red App Centre will connect to the Sabre Red Workspace, launched last year for travel agents to book and manage business and leisure travel.

As a result, travel buyers will be able to easily shop for a wide range of applications that best meet their needs and then quickly deploy those applications down to the individual user.

“Every year, Sabre invests hundreds of millions of dollars and works closely with more than 130 authorized developers to research and develop new products that help our customers compete and win in a complex industry,” said Webb.

“Creating an online B2B marketplace will spur a whole new level of innovation for the benefit of Sabre connected agencies globally.”

The selected Red Apps become part of the agent’s workspace, leveraging the administrative controls and plug-in capabilities of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, upon which the Red Workspace is built.

The Red App Centre provides current Sabre Authorized Developers a marketplace to promote and sell their certified Red Apps to Sabre-connected agencies globally, while at the same time providing a platform and business model to attract new developers to the industry.

In addition to developing new Red Apps, developers will realize new sales opportunities by converting existing applications to Red Apps that will plug seamlessly into the Red Workspace. At launch, developers will be able to tap into more than 155,000 Sabre Red Workspace users in more than 116 countries.

Developers will use the Sabre Red App Developer Toolkit to create the Red Apps, and in the fourth quarter, Sabre will host a ‘Developer Challenge’ for developers around the world to compete to build the most innovative, break-through Red Apps.