Sabre Corporation, the leading technology provider to the global travel industry, has been recognized by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as NDC Level 3 capable as an I.T. provider. Reaching this milestone less than two months after announcing Level 2 capability, Sabre accelerates its commitment to leading the evolution of retailing and distribution technology.

By granting Sabre "NDC capable" Level 3 status under the NDC certification program, IATA recognizes that Sabre supports deployments using offer and order management messages whose schemas are compliant with the standard NDC message schema. Sabre has therefore demonstrated its ability to provide a broad range of retailing capabilities to a variety of sellers, including end-to-end offer and order fulfilment and servicing.

Along with the ability to create and personalize offers, Level 3 capability indicates that Sabre is now positioned to fulfil and service those orders throughout the entire process in both direct and indirect channels. A major component of this includes verifying offer integrity and ensuring that the order management system can accurately enforce orders based on the rules of the original offer. It is Sabre's leading position at the centre of the travel industry that empowers it to leverage data from a variety of sources, ultimately reinforcing offer integrity and fulfilment. Going forward, Sabre is actively working to deploy these capabilities in the coming months through close collaboration with its customers.

"This represents significant progress in our NDC-enabled airline retailing and product distribution strategy and demonstrates how we impact every step of the order and fulfilment process," said Dave Shirk, president of Sabre Airline Solutions. "But Level 3 capability is just one step in the process of constant innovation and adaptation to a changing marketplace, and now we are focused on bringing these new capabilities to market as part of our drive to achieving an end-to-end product and services distribution solution."

Sabre is also certified as an NDC Level 1 aggregator, with a roadmap to reaching Level 3 in 2018.

Contributed by Sabre