Sabre, FCTG confirm deal

SABRE overnight finally confirmed one of the industry’s longest-running open secrets - the rollout of the Sabre Red Workspace across the Flight Centre network in Australia & NZ.

First flagged more than two years ago in travelBulletin, the pact saw Flight Centre switch to Sabre from its long-running relationship with Travelport.

In an announcement last night FCTG md Graham Turner confirmed that the Sabre suite had been fully implemented.

More than 1,300 Flight Centre locations representing nearly 9,500 consultants are now using Sabre in Australia & NZ “resulting in a solid increase in conversions compared to the same time last year,” the companies said.

Sabre has also been able to reduce the time required for initial training and onboarding of Flight Centre staff “in addition to providing a system designed to allow consultants to up-sell and cross-sell more effectively”.

Turner said one of the company’s key global strategies had been to increase productivity, with the agreement seeing Flight Centre Travel Group using the Sabre GDS as “one of its key platforms” to shop, book and manage travel content.

Last year he confirmed that the transition to the new system would “inevitably lead to some distraction and disruption for our people in-store while the upgrades are underway,” with improvement expected during the Jan-Jun 2018 half year as the new systems are deployed, productivity starts to improve and “we start to grow our sales force”.

In Flight Centre’s recent half- year results announcement Turner confirmed the completion of the roll-out, with over 7,000 leisure agents migrated to Sabre over a five month period.