Amadeus and Sabre collaborate on payments venture

The European Commission has approved a joint venture between Amadeus and Sabre Holdings to create a joint venture aimed at automating payments for the travel industry.

To the called Moneydirect, the business will be established in Ireland with subsidiaries in the US and Australia.

It is designed to provide secure, automated payment processing, clearing and reconciliation for the travel and tourism industry, according to the two technology companies. 

The aim is to establish an industry standard solution to improve and better meet the requirements of the trade with “payment efficiencies, increased automation, and improved interoperability”.

Moneydirect will initially focus on travel suppliers such as hotels, cruise lines, tour operators, car rental companies, ferries, railways and travel intermediaries such as travel agencies and wholesalers.

Examples of services to be offered include processing of deposits and pre-paid bookings, bulk settlement for group bookings and global commissions processing.

Amadeus and Sabre stress that the initiative is GDS independent and will provide a neutral platform for payments.

Sabre’s marketing chief Greg Webb said: “While Amadeus and Sabre compete in many areas, both companies saw the tremendous opportunity to provide an industry standard where none exists today.

“The companies have unprecedented scale as evidenced by our technologies and business processes installed and integrated at thousands of travel agencies around the world, all of which do business with hotels, cruise lines, car rental companies, tour operators, rail companies and other suppliers. 

“This means a tremendous amount of cost and complexity today due to different handling of money flows and associated data elements in each point of sale, back-office application and with each trade partner.

“In addition to the complexity this creates for travel industry suppliers and travel agencies, there is also very little automation for the payment processing. 

“Because Moneydirect offers a solution to address this complexity and inefficiency, we have received very positive reaction about this new solution.”

Amadeus corporate strategy senior vice-president Philippe Chérèque said: “We believe Moneydirect can help the industry significantly increase efficiencies and reduce reliance on manual processes.

“Moneydirect will have the flexibility to handle any type of payment, will have a high level of security, and the ability to integrate with existing front and back office products with these features.”

by Phil Davies 

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