Sabre Partners With CellPoint Digital on Travel Industry Payment Solutions

Sabre, a software and technology provider in the global travel industry, has partnered with CellPoint Digital, a payment solutions provider for the airline industry.

Under the agreement, Sabre customers will now have access to CellPoint Digital’s suite of payment services, allowing airlines, agencies and hotels using Sabre solutions to gain easier access to payment orchestration solutions, the companies said in a Tuesday (Oct. 24) press release.

By integrating with Sabre’s technology solutions, CellPoint Digital’s payment services will be directly connected and preconfigured for all current and prospective airline merchants and other travel companies, according to the release.

CellPoint Digital’s payment orchestration platform, known as Velocity, enables airlines and travel merchants to dynamically route transactions to preferred acquirers, quickly add new acquirers and streamline cross-border payments, the release said. This capabilities help users mitigate costs, diversify risk and increase conversions.

Additionally, CellPoint Digital allows airlines and travel merchants to offer more payment options to passengers and travelers, per the release.

These new capabilities join Sabre’s solutions that unlock more revenue streams, improve efficiencies and enhance the customer experience, according to the press release.

“We are thrilled to partner with CellPoint Digital and make it easier for our customers to access their payment orchestration solutions,” Becky French, vice president of product management at Sabre Travel Solutions, said in the release. “This partnership marks a significant step forward in supporting our customers with improved capabilities in the ever-changing, fast-growing and dynamic payment space.”

By leveraging payment orchestration, airlines can automate their systems and ensure data integrity, creating a simplified and smooth experience for the traveler, CellPoint Digital CEO Kristian Gjerding told PYMNTS in an interview posted in September.

“On a practical level, when airlines aren’t automating these processes, they are losing money because it is a waste of [human] resources,” Gjerding said. “It is a good thing to have automation and sophisticated capable systems that create a great user experience and that are future-proof.”

The shift toward more fully considering payments’ role began about five years ago for the airlines, as they started to approach providers to take advantage of a platform approach to deal with transaction-related frictions, Gjerding told PYMNTS in another interview posted in August.