Airlines are starting to pick up their investment in new technologies that will propel them into the world of modern retailing, a keynote session led by Sabre at T2RLEngage heard.

This year’s conference in London took place a year after Sabre revealed Virgin Australia as its launch partner for Sabre Mosaic a modular retailing platform developed with Google.

This year Sabre launched new AI-powered tools on the back of Sabre IQ, the layer of modern technologies on which products like Mosaic are being developed.

Mike Reyes, senior vice president of product management at Sabre, said this was not technology “buzzword bingo” but real technology now being used by airline partners.

“It powers petabytes worth of curated travel data,” he said. “It’s systemic in any new product development.

Since announcing Virgin Australia as the launch partner Sabre now has over 10 airlines deployed on Mosaic with either proof of concepts or full blown product launches.

Reyes said: “Our observation is airlines are very much starting to pick up their investment in Offer, Order, Settle, Deliver (OOSD) programmes.

“That’s led to over $77 million in incremental revenue for some of these airline partners.” he said.

Sabre unveiled two innovations – a classless revenue optimiser which it claims is a first for the sector and native order management.

Reyes said: “Historically revenue management has been based on the law of large numbers – grouping together similar sets of passengers and opening and closing booking classes.

“This industry has ben constrained by the number of letters in the alphabet in terms if how you do segmentation and ultimately how you are letting someone price on your behalf.

As the technology has evolved we can today relax some of those constraints and in some cases get rid of the entirely.

Shihaj Kutty, vice president pricing, RM and ancillaries at Riyadh Air, the launch partner for continuous revenue optimiser said the airline saw an opportunity to challenge norms.

“When you think of the customer, it’s hard. From a pure guest experience point of view we have trained our passenger to behave in a certain way.

“This has got to change so this was an opportunity to start thinking of true digital retailing. What we are doing in not modern it’s been there for the last 15 years, we are just retailing.”

Kutty said his team of 15, half of which have no airline experience, working on continuous revenue optimiser are for the first time working on pricing “as it is meant to be”.

“No more let’s benchmark another airline and just match them, that’s really dumb because that doesn’t take into consideration network structures of other airlines.

“For a change we’re forced to think like proper statisticians and economists and pricing for what it is meant to be. How do you put a value on your products and services that are unique.”

Working with Virgin Australia, Sabre has started implementing native ordering with Reyes said is necessary of the industry is to see the benefit of the digital transformation of retailing.

David Hogarth, chief information officer at Virgin Australia, said the airline recently took its first order on the Mosaic platform.

Looking ahead he said the next step is to focus on its direct channel booking engine and to adopt the revenue management approach that Riyadh Air has taken.

“We’re pretty excited to see how we can transform our airline given a lot of our revenue comes from the direct channel, that’s a good opportunity through our website.”

Hogarth added there’s a balance to be struck in managing its transition from the old world to the new world of modern retailing and that it wanted to be incrementally not have a “big bang”.

“That’s a hard one for us. We’ve got a very full revenue transformation pipeline and we’re not quite at that point where we’d say we’re going to put that in the offer order. We’ll be there soon.

“I guess the bias in the organisation is speed to market and so that’s the challenge for us. We have a very full revenue transformation pipeline, probably less on the costs side.

“Cost is very simple but revenue is a little bit harder. We’re trying balance that in terms of what’s the right things to move into offer order.”