Following Sabre’s US$1.1 billion sale of its Hospitality Solutions business, Deepshikha Sehgal, head of demand, APAC – lodging, ground and sea (LGS), shares her insights on the future of B2B hotel distribution and its impact on travel agencies and hotels
What’s the impact of the sale of Sabre Hospitality Solutions on Sabre Lodging?
It’s very much business as usual for the LGS side of our business, which is what I lead across Asia-Pacific. In fact, we’re actually doubling down on our efforts in this space.
I think it’s important to clarify that Sabre Hospitality Solutions and LGS serve different but complementary roles in the travel ecosystem. Hospitality Solutions provides operational and retailing technology to hoteliers, helping them manage day-to-day operations and execute their retail strategy. By contrast, our focus in LGS is on lodging distribution – connecting hotel suppliers with travel sellers through our global SabreMosaic Travel Marketplace.
So, just as Sabre enables airlines to distribute their fares and offers to travel sellers, we help hoteliers make their properties more visible, bookable, and competitive in the global ecosystem. Our marketplace provides access to more than two million property options. In fact, Hospitality Solutions is one of our most valued supply partners, and that relationship remains unchanged. They will continue to distribute their hotelier partner content through Sabre, helping ensure broad visibility and global reach for their customers.
While Hospitality Solutions embarks on a new chapter as a standalone entity, for LGS, our direction is clear: we’re doubling down on investment and innovation that helps hoteliers and travel sellers connect, grow, and win together for the benefit of their travellers.
Why is Sabre increasing its focus on hotels’ B2B distribution?
Let me take this from a travel seller’s perspective first: the hotel B2B distribution space represents a major untapped opportunity for travel agencies.
Hotels typically offer higher margins compared to air bookings, meaning agencies can drive greater profitability without increasing customer acquisition costs – they already have the traveller booking a flight, and that traveller will almost always need accommodation. Yet, despite this natural synergy, many agencies are still leaving significant revenue on the table.
Our recent study with select agency customers found a hotel attachment rate (HAR) of only 37 per cent, meaning that for most air bookings, no hotel is being sold alongside them. For many agencies, increasing this rate could translate into millions of dollars in additional revenue, depending on their size and scale.
Our goal is to help our partners unlock this potential. Looking specifically at Asia-Pacific, our data underscores the opportunity. The average Asia-Pacific business traveller spends US$741 per trip, with 32 per cent going to hotels – the single largest share of the travel wallet. Yet hotels are only attached to air bookings about 30 per cent of the time, which shows how much room there is to grow.
How are you helping agencies to increase hotel attachment (or to sell more hotel rooms)?
Sabre Lodging AI makes selling hotels easy—seamlessly suggesting hotel options when an air seat is booked. It brings intelligent capabilities to Content Services for Lodging, which is part of SabreMosaic Travel Marketplace – serving up properties that are most likely to be booked. Using Sabre Travel AI and advanced machine-learning capabilities from Google, the new capability analyses property attributes, customer trip segmentation, and traveller and agency preferences to generate custom lodging options. If a traveller has requested a specific property that isn’t available, Lodging AI returns up to 20 alternative lodging options in an API response, providing a score based on closest match.
Lodging AI’s cross-sell functionality also allows agents to identify previously booked air segments that are eligible for hotel stays, and offers hotel options through confirmation or trip reminder emails. This feature has been crucial in boosting hotel attachment rates even after the initial booking is completed, offering a new way to generate additional revenue for agencies.
Those are the benefits for travel agencies. What are the benefits for hotels?
While travel sellers want to be able to shop, sell, and service the world’s travel content – including lodging – through one connection, hoteliers want to increase visibility, and reach travel sellers at the point they are booking. With SabreMosaic Travel Marketplace, hoteliers can reach more customers where they are shopping, with access to the widest breadth of high-value corporate and premium leisure travellers in one place.
Our global travel platform delivers higher average daily rates by connecting hotel suppliers with high-value travellers. Another key advantage is that while cancellations on other channels, such as OTAs, can reach 30 to 40 per cent, our global travel marketplace maintains a rate lower than 10 per cent because bookings are typically confirmed and committed.
How do you meet the varying hotel needs of agencies? Please explain the importance of direct connectivity.
Travel agencies are telling us loud and clear that they are facing growing pressure from fragmented content systems that are increasing operational costs and making it harder to deliver a consistent customer experience. We commissioned a new global study which revealed that more than 91 per cent of agencies operate with four or more booking systems, and over half are managing seven or more – a sprawl that is directly impacting productivity, profitability, and agent satisfaction. So, it’s clear agencies don’t want more connects and more complexity. They want to get the widest breadth of content through one connect – that’s why we developed SabreMosaic Travel Marketplace.
We have two million plus lodging options available on our marketplace through Content Services for Lodging. We have global hotel chains, direct connectivity with central reservation systems, and content from global aggregators including Booking.com, Expedia Partner Solutions, Bedsonline, and Nuitée. This breadth allows us to meet the diverse needs of agencies, whether they’re serving leisure or corporate clients.
However, it’s not just about the most content. The problem today is not the lack of content. It’s about consolidating and normalising everything to surface the most relevant, most-likely-to-be-booked, lodging options; and the best thing about this is it comes in a single API. Agencies don’t have to do all the groundwork and heavy lifting of maintaining all these different connects and aggregators.
How does Sabre’s loyalty programme for agencies work?
When an agency books hotel content through the SabreMosaic Travel Marketplace, the booking is attributed to the agency. We pass the agency’s identifiers to the hotel so the property can recognise the agency as the demand generator.
That matters for three reasons. Firstly, many hotel groups run agency-facing or loyalty programmes, meaning those stays can qualify for the agency’s rewards or commission tiers. Sabre’s rates are also generally eligible for loyalty recognition and accrual on the traveller side, subject to each chain’s rules, with commissions paid by the hotel flowing through to the agency. Also, consistent attribution can strengthen an agency’s relationship with hotels as the hotel can clearly see the business the agency is driving.
We’re actively investing in this space – on our roadmap are deeper loyalty credential passthrough, automated accrual, and richer reporting so agencies can more easily track and maximise the value of their hotel bookings. In short, booking hotels through Sabre means the agency gets the credit, the traveller gets recognised, commissions stay intact, and data strengthens the agency’s future negotiating power – benefits that can typically be lost when booking through third-party aggregators.
What other industry challenges are you addressing, having joined Sabre in October last year, after over 15 years of high-profile roles in travel and hospitality industry?
Hotel distribution remains one of the most complex areas of travel and simplifying it is a major industry challenge. Content fragmentation has been a longstanding issue, making it harder for agencies to present travellers with the best, most relevant options. One of the ways we’re tackling this is by solving fundamental problems like property and room type mapping, as part of our normalisation efforts – ensuring that a single hotel doesn’t appear multiple times under different names from various booking sources. Our proprietary mapping technology, developed with the team in our innovation lab, Sabre Labs, delivers very high accuracy with global chains – significantly higher than industry standards.
Beyond normalisation, we’re focused on future proofing hotel distribution around digital payments. Agencies want more digitalised payment solutions, but hotels also need to evolve to accept these methods, especially in Asia. Our goal is to drive transformation across the agency and hotel sides to ensure seamless, modern distribution.
Central to our vision of a more connected and intelligent travel ecosystem. We’re continuously enhancing the SabreMosaic Travel Marketplace platform to deliver richer content, smarter personalisation, and seamless integration across channels. For travel sellers, this means more relevant choices and better conversion. For lodging partners, it means greater visibility and more meaningful engagement with travellers.
In Asia-Pacific, where diversity and complexity define the market, our focus is on localising innovation – whether through more relevant content, deeper loyalty credential passthrough, or advanced analytics. It’s about creating value at every touch point.
