Unexpected disruptions in air travel, cruise and hotel reservations can dampen holiday spirits or ruin business plans. These disruptions are more frequent today due to extreme weather conditions, IT system failures, pilot strikes, technical glitches in aircraft, and geopolitical conflicts that close airspaces. By using AI and cloud for travel intelligence, Sabre Corporation aims to make travel disruptions more predictable and personalize travel experiences.

Sabre, a software and technology company that tackles challenges in the travel industry, has been collecting data from its travel partners – which include airlines, hoteliers, agencies and cruise liner companies – for years. It plans to harness the collected data to introduce intelligent services and products for its global customers.

The company also provides property management and central reservation systems for some of the largest hotel chains worldwide. Sabre uses its global distribution system to market and sell air and hotel services to both brick-and-mortar and online travel agencies around the world.

Sabre realized this would not be possible without using the power of AI in the cloud. To achieve this goal, Sabre began migrating its 17 on-premises data centers to Google Cloud. It achieved full cloud migration this year, and all its on-premises data centers are now shut down. Joe DiFonzo, CIO at Sabre Corporation, told Information Security Media Group that the company is running all its day-to-day operations from the cloud.

“Over the course of this effort, we’ve moved more than 40,000 servers, 400,000 CPUs and 50 petabytes of storage into the cloud,” DiFonzo said in a LinkedIn post.

The impact of AI could be substantial, with over $28 billion that could accrue in terms of revenues in the industry, including suppliers, consumers or the facilitator that facilitates marketplaces that connect the two, said Sundar Narasimhan, senior vice president of labs technology and platform at Sabre, while addressing a media roundtable (see Image 1).

“Over 75% of businesses are reworking their strategies to incorporate not only cloud as basic infrastructure, but are building on top of it with AI enablers that would enable them to provide [intelligent] products and services to their intended consumers,” Narasimhan said.

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This story, published on CIO.inc contains inputs from a roundtable hosted by Sabre and Google.