Open the news app of your choice and start scrolling – you won’t get far without coming across a story about AI. Scroll a little further, and you’re certain to hit one particularly focused on AI in travel.

But, beneath the pomp and circumstance of recent announcements about big travel players “entering” the AI space, a little deeper dig unearths the truth: Everything that’s been highly publicized as “innovative” and “the future of this industry” is really just a wrapper on existing systems that have been around the block more than a few times.

The result is a surface-level experience that, at first glance, appears modern, but, in reality, is nothing more than a veneer connecting you to OnlineTravelAgency.com to book a component of your trip, maybe two or three. While that’s certainly a noble step forward for those companies on their AI journey, it’s not the future of travel… it’s a glorified search engine. Might as well use generative AI for inspiration then just visit travel websites directly.

The real future of AI in travel would look like an autonomous travel assistant that can power shopping, booking, and servicing flights, hotel stays and more. Not a referral link. Not a bolt-on. Not a brand app. That was fine for social commerce in 2015. Today’s consumers require a seamless experience whereby technology becomes the agent—something the industry actually hasn’t seen before.

There’s really only one company that’s capable of making that vision a reality today. And that’s Sabre.

While not a household name, it’s likely that every person that has traveled in the last 60 years has interacted with a Sabre system in some capacity. We built the first computerized reservation system. We helped launch the early online booking engines that brought travel into the digital age. Today, we manage one of the largest curated travel data clouds in the world.

At CES, we're exploring what we believe is the most important technological shift in travel since the Internet, showing what becomes possible when powerful AI solutions meet the widest breadth and depth of travel content. When they can plan, book, fix, and optimize a trip the moment someone asks. When the hardest parts of travel can be handled instantly, accurately, and at scale. We’re powering the real future of agentic AI travel.

The truth is that travel is unbelievably complex. The number of possible routes and combinations is infinite – too many for any SKUs-based catalog. Unlike online shopping for something straightforward, like the perfect red sweater – where buying is visual and logistics are predictable – shopping for travel isn’t just about choosing a destination; it’s about syncing flights, hotels, ground transport, and availability across multiple travelers, all shaped by where you live, who you’re traveling with, where you’re going and how you’ll get there.

The path from today’s language models to tomorrow’s trusted autonomous travel agents requires deliberate design and iterative progress, leveraging the flexibility of agentic-ready APIs (a way for two systems to talk to each other) and the orchestration power of an Model Context Protocol (MCP) server (which works like a universal translator), both of which Sabre has debuted at scale for the travel industry.

Sabre has long offered APIs that enable functions like shopping, booking, and travel support, but traditionally, these APIs required technical expertise to use. They followed standards

such as web service APIs that were widely accessible yet demanded programming skill to leverage effectively. This created a gap between powerful back-end capabilities and user-friendly interaction.

What is new is the emergence of AI combined with technologies like MCP bridges that gap. MCP connects back-end APIs to AI-driven front-end applications, translating natural language requests into precise technical commands. This means anything can interact with Sabre’s systems through conversational AI without needing to understand the underlying API structures. And, because MCP offers a consistent adapter, companies using different AI platforms can still access Sabre’s data and capabilities in a simple, unified way.

Together, these agentic-ready APIs and MCP server let any AI system understand the real rules needed to shop, book, change, or support a trip. It’s that foundational technology that will set the standard for true change.

Competitors sprinkle AI around the edges. Sabre has integrated AI into the center of its platform. Competitors rely on narrow views of the travel landscape. Sabre gives AI access to the full structure and rules of global travel, so it understands how decisions connect and what must happen next. Where others offer AI tools that sound smart but break under pressure, Sabre provides the intelligence, trust, and operational depth AI needs to act correctly.

Instead of searching through filters, flipping between apps, or calling support lines, Sabre’s technology will enable people to describe what they want in plain language, and agentic AI will not only understand and recommended itineraries, but power the booking and fulfilment of the trip – all within a single conversation. A traveler might say, “Plan me a quiet weekend in Lisbon with great food and a day trip to Sintra,” and AI will turn that into real, bookable choices in seconds. Another traveler might say, “Find me a business trip that gets me into Chicago by noon, avoids red-eyes, and uses my airline credits,” and AI will assemble and book that trip without a single form or filter.

The system will handle requests too complicated for websites to understand. Someone might simply ask for a trip where they fly into Rome, take a train to Florence, spend one night in a boutique hotel, continue on to Venice by ferry, and return

through Milan. AI will map the entire route, match the timing across trains and flights, find rooms that fit the schedule, and make sure everything lines up. A family might ask, “Keep us all on the same flights, find seats together, and make sure our hotel has early check-in,” and AI will shape the whole itinerary around that instruction. Even highly specific requests, like, “Plan a ten-day trip across Japan with two days of skiing, three days in Tokyo, and a hotel near a late-night food market,” will become simple conversational tasks.

Travelers only need to explain what they want, and Sabre’s technology and extensive data cloud enables agentic AI to do the rest. Travel will finally move at the speed of conversation, and for the first time, the system will be able to manage the full lifecycle of a trip from the moment the idea is spoken until the traveler returns safely home.

Most travelers don’t think about travel disruption until it hits them. Agentic AI won’t wait that long.

As a result of Sabre’s MCP and agentic APIs, other companies can build their own AI helpers on top of Sabre’s foundation. They can augment tools that automatically fix a trip the moment something goes wrong, like securing a new connection when a delay threatens a tight layover. They can build services that hold a hotel room when a traveler’s incoming flight is running late. They can offer AI assistants that keep families on the same itinerary, track changing gate information in real time, or solve problems, like missing seat assignments, before a traveler even notices.

The biggest change coming to travel is that agentic AI will not wait for you to ask for help. It will see problems forming long before they reach you and offer to adjust the trip automatically. If a storm in Denver begins to ripple across the network and threatens a connection in Dallas, the agentic AI could reroute

you while you're still in the air and hold seats on the best alternatives. If a hotel begins to fill and inventory tightens, agentic AI can secure the room you need before the price rises or the option disappears. When immigration lines surge at certain hours, agentic AI might suggest and shift your arrival time or adjust transfers so you don't lose an hour standing still.

This kind of foresight is only possible because Sabre gives AI access to the real-time signals, servicing rules, scheduling logic, and operational behaviors that determine how travel works beneath the surface. Sabre’s platform lets the AI understand how disruptions spread, how bookings interact, and how to rebuild a trip safely and correctly without human intervention.

For the first time, travelers will experience trips that stay on track even when the world around them shifts. By enabling AI to work directly inside the same systems agents use, Sabre makes it possible for problems to be solved before the traveler ever knows there was a problem at all.

Sabre is an enterprise SaaS platform for travel headquartered in the U.S., with a footprint that spans 150+ countries around the world. Today we serve over 14,000 flight transactions per second and over 11 billion shopping requests per month—always optimizing the lowest latency possible.

At Sabre, leading through tech transformations is nothing new. From pioneering the first computerized reservation system, to co-creating one of the earliest online booking engines, to migrating more than 50 petabytes of data to the cloud through our strategic innovation partnership with Google, we’ve consistently been at the forefront.

Curiosity is our compass. It has helped over 420+ airline partners, 50K+ travel agencies, and 2M+ hotel properties stay ahead of every major technology transformation in travel for the last few decades—and it’s why today we’re squarely focused on guiding the world into the next age of travel: agentic.

As executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Jen is responsible for all aspects of product marketing and insights, branding and social media strategy, design, corporate messaging, public and media relations, events and external affairs.

Jen joined Sabre from Travelport, a global travel technology company, where she served as chief marketing officer. Prior to the travel industry, she worked at Telaria – a video advertising software company. While there, she launched a brand campaign to reposition Tremor Video as a sell-side video platform and leader in connected television. Jen oversaw all facets of Telaria’s global marketing, including PR, product marketing, sales development, branding, design, content, education, events and research.

Entrepreneurial in spirit and driven by data, Jennifer also launched a full-service programmatic agency prior to her role at Telaria. Additionally, she has held a variety of influential roles of increasing responsibility at Travelocity, Conde Nast and SAY.

Jen is a media-trained expert who frequently presents at industry conferences and events, and she serves as a resource for AdAge, CNBC and CNN. What’s more, Jen is a recent Cannes Lions Award nominee and AdAge Brand Leader Award winner.

Further, Jen has been an active member of She Runs It, with whom she created an event series titled “Mic Drop,” to help women in technology and advertising master public speaking.

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Middlebury College. Outside of work, Jen is an avid traveler who is proficient in Italian, Spanish, French and Swahili.

Brad is a technology leader with nearly 30 years’ expertise in building and scaling travel-tech platforms. As Senior Director of Product Management at Sabre, he drives innovation across travel touchpoints, modernizing traditional systems into API-first, cloud-enabled solutions and integrating AI-driven automation. With a strong foundation in UX, lean-agile practices, and enterprise architecture, Brad specializes in transforming complex workflows into intuitive, high-performance products that power the future of travel.

Sabre is the first to bring real, functional, agentic AI to the travel industry.