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Global enterprise SaaS firm Sabre Corporation has released a report showcasing the seven key trends that have changed the way the global travel sector works throughout 2025.
Per the report, the industry seems to be at an inflection point: abundant content and data, coupled with mounting complexity.
From generative AI and conversational commerce to modern payments, 2025 has been a year of transformation aimed at tackling that complexity.
Entering 2026, the industry is poised to shift from “more” to “more meaningful,” from content overload to connected retailing built on intelligence, curation, and trust.
Sabre’s experts expect 2026 to bring a full-tilt lean into these emerging shifts, as AI-driven personalization, seamless automation, and comprehensive payment solutions redefine the traveler experience.
Trend 1: Goodbye Static Chat, Hello Agentic Actions
In 2026, Generative AI will no longer be the shiny new experiment: it’s part of everyday life and workflows, reshaping the inspiration phase of travel.
Recent reports reveal that up to 80 percent of travelers are already using AI tools for travel planning while 65 percent prefer brands that use AI to personalize experiences.
But, if 2025 was the year GenAI became the norm, 2026 is the year of agentic intelligence: a time when systems not only suggest and assist with travel plans, but act based on user preferences.
While GenAI chatbots have shown the potential, it’s agentic AI that will eliminate friction between traveler intent and fulfillment.
Possibly coming up next are agentic systems that take autonomous actions on behalf of users from booking, rebooking, or optimising trips in real time, all within governed frameworks.
Sabre’s first-to-market agentic APIs and Model Context Protocol (MCP) translator will accelerate this shift, enabling agentic AI to understand the complex language of travel technology.
Next year will bring endless opportunities to transform travel using agentic AI and the possibilities for automated action are endless.
Trend 2: Goodbye Content Chaos, Hello Connected Retailing
If 2025 had a defining theme, it was content fragmentation: the industry reached a tipping point this year, with travel sellers managing more sources than ever before from New Distribution Capability (NDC) and Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) to direct connects and aggregators.
For many, this created content chaos: too many channels, too little consistency, and rising complexity for both sellers and suppliers – and ultimately, travelers.
In a Sabre-commissioned global survey, most travel agencies reported managing four or more connections, driving up costs and undermining customer experience.
Yet, amid the noise, a clear need has emerged: simplification and unification as over 80 percent of agencies said they want unified content access through a single platform.
In 2025, Sabre responded with SabreMosaic
Travel Marketplace, bringing together the industry’s widest breadth of travel content in one cloud-native, AI-infused place.
SabreMosaic Travel Marketplace is made up of industry leading live NDC airline content, as well as offers from over 150 LCCs, traditional airline content, two million lodging options and over 70 car and rail providers.
Even more content and capabilities are coming in 2026, helping agencies turn fragmentation into seamless workflows.
Trend 3: Goodbye NDC as Emerging, Hello NDC as Expected
NDC used to be the buzzword of airline retailing as it was new, optional, and experimental.
What was novel then is now normal, with two-thirds of airlines implementing the standard, NDC is no longer a competitive differentiator; it has become a baseline expectation for modern airline retailing.
In 2026, the industry says goodbye to the idea of NDC as a standalone channel, as the era of separate workflows, bespoke servicing processes and fragmented integrations is giving way to a connected approach that Sabre has long been leading, where agencies can shop, book and service NDC offers alongside traditional and low-cost carrier content.
The shift signals a broader maturity: NDC is no longer a siloed experiment, but an integrated part of the retailing ecosystem that supports richer, data-driven offers without adding operational complexity.
The shift isn’t just about more airlines going live: it’s about the ecosystem finally having the capabilities that make NDC workable at scale.
Agencies have been clear: for NDC to be genuinely compelling, three things must be in place: breadth of content, depth of capabilities, and the ability to run efficient, end-to-end workflows.
Trend 4: Goodbye Direct-Only Detours, Welcome Back Indirect
In 2026, Sabre sees a clear shift on the horizon: a return to the fold for some, a first foray for others.
Carriers that once operated on the sidelines are joining or re-joining the broader travel marketplace, integrating their content and retailing capabilities where demand truly lives: in connected platforms used daily by agencies and corporate buyers worldwide.
Sabre’s own data and carrier feedback reflect this momentum, as airlines that expand their marketplace participation typically see immediate share gains and improved yield from high-value segments.
Alaska Air Group’s decision, for example, to restore full Hawaiian Airlines content to indirect channels and do away with Hawaiian’s global distribution system surcharge is already delivering value.
Direct-connect models, once seen as “the future,” have often proved harder to scale, with higher servicing costs and fragmented customer experiences.
Sabre’s expanded LCC and aggregated direct-connect content, launching in early 2026, will further simplify access to content from leading carriers.
By offering unified workflows, richer retailing capabilities, and servicing parity across carrier types, Sabre is helping airlines transform distribution from an operational challenge into a strategic advantage.
Trend 5: Goodbye Look-to-Book Busts, Hello Intelligent Shopping
While AI-driven search activity, together with fragmented content sources, is fueling a look-to-book surge, AI also holds the solution.
In 2026, we’ll say goodbye to inefficient, one-size-fits-all search models, and hello to predictive, intelligent caching that uses AI to anticipate demand, filter irrelevant results, and deliver real-time accuracy without overloading systems.
At the same time, intelligent shopping technology will unify APIs, AI and cache to provide the industry and its travelers with a solution that is not only aware of applicable airline quotas and how to optimize them, but also provides AI-enhanced content validation, ensuring those cached offers that are still visible remain bookable, giving users the validation they need.
The result? Faster responses, lower costs, and a new era of predictive travel retailing.
Pricing and offer construction are undergoing similar transformation. SabreMosaic Continuous Revenue Optimizer (CRO) is one example of how airlines are breaking free of rigid fare classes and embracing continuous, classless pricing that adapts to real-time demand.
Also, Sabre’s broader offer optimization family of solutions, including Ancillary IQ, Upgrade IQ, and the upcoming Bundle IQ launching in 2026, brings AI-powered insight to every element of the offer.
Together, these capabilities move the industry to intelligent offer management – where the right traveler gets the right offer at exactly the right time, validated, priced, and ready to book.
Trend 6: Goodbye Back-Office Payments, Hello Embedded Payment Intelligence
In 2026, payments step out of the back office and into the retail engine, not as a cost to contain, but as intelligence to compound.
The winners won’t just process transactions; they’ll orchestrate them, turning every authorization into a decision about margin, risk, cash flow, and trust.
Offer and order-based retailing has collapsed the distance between what a traveler sees and how a merchant gets paid.
Checkout is now, essentially, an extension of the offer itself. If the offer adapts to a traveler’s context, the payment must adapt with it.
Anything less introduces friction, higher fees, or lost bookings.
In this new world, payment choice becomes part of the shopping experience, and payment insight becomes part of retail strategy.
In 2026, travel providers will embrace payments as an integral product, and Sabre is rapidly accelerating that evolution through Sabre Payments, a unified fintech hub processing more than $20B in transactions annually.
It streamlines travel payments processes for buyers and suppliers while offering value-add financial services.
Trend 7: Goodbye Locked-In Legacy, Hello Open, Modular Future
Airlines are no longer locked into monolithic systems or all-or-nothing upgrades; instead, they’re embracing componentized, best-of-breed retailing architecture that allows them to modernize at their own pace, piece by piece, without being dependent on any single platform or vendor.
This shift to openness is driven by the need to give airlines better control over how they create, price, distribute, and fulfill modern offers, including the ability to blend third-party content, dynamic products, and ancillary services into unified, service-ready orders, all optimised for a world where customer expectations and competitive dynamics change by the minute.
In this new era, modularity becomes the backbone of Offer and Order transformation. Airlines are increasingly adopting an architecture that mirrors IATA’s emerging reference frameworks, where product catalog, offer management, order management, delivery, payment, and settlement are interoperable building blocks, not locked components.
2025 delivered a major proof point for this impending shift: during IATA’s Modularity Proof-of-Concept programme which involved multi-vendor collaboration to demonstrate how different components can work together for an end-to-end experience, Sabre demonstrated true interoperability in action. It showcased the ability to search, sell, and fulfill a hybrid air-and-hotel bundle, including dynamic seat pricing, with full payment and settlement flow via ONE order.
This proof of concept was built collaboratively with leading ecosystem partners, including Google, Hyatt Hotels, Lufthansa Systems, and CellPoint Digital, illustrating exactly how airlines can assemble best-of-breed components across the entire retailing lifecycle.
Together, these shifts mean airlines are no longer defined by systems they may have chosen decades ago, but by the ecosystems they choose to build now.
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Source: traveldailymedia