Home Resources Press Center MCP is the new NDC: Is this travel’s streaming moment?
Press Center
September 20, 2026
While competitors announce plans to modernize, Sabre already has — and its customers are live and benefiting from AI because of it.
SOUTHLAKE, Texas, September 20 — While some in the travel technology industry are still writing press releases about plans to implement agentic AI, Sabre (NASDAQ: SABR) has already brought it to life.
Over the last decade, the travel industry has gone through the adoption of NDC. Sabre has invested heavily in NDC and is a leader in this space. Based on the premise that the next decade of the industry may be powered by MCP, Sabre already has a one-year head start in search and booking and is in the production phase for servicing capabilities.
In September 2025, Sabre launched its MCP server — a connective layer that allows AI agents to directly book, sell, and service travel based on Sabre’s data and inventory. Today, this is not a roadmap. It is a reality. Nearly 80 Sabre customers are testing or already fully using the MCP server in production, including Virgin Australia, Flight Centre, and Internova (through its Global Travel Collection, Nexion, ALTOUR, and Travel Leaders Network divisions), which is already delivering real savings and real bookings.
This is the gap the rest of the industry has yet to bridge. Competitors are announcing modernization steps that Sabre took long ago. Every headline about a “new AI partnership” this quarter proves just how far behind the rest of the market is.
The opportunity is massive, and the time to realize it is short. In the Bessemer Venture Partners “State of AI 2025” report, end-to-end travel booking via autonomous AI agents was identified as one of the largest untapped opportunities in consumer AI. This requires decades of airline and hotel commercial logic, proprietary travel data, and integrations that no point solution or base model can replicate on its own. Sabre is uniquely positioned, managing a global travel data cloud at significant scale.
Sabre’s autonomous agent infrastructure is already deployed across the channels that travelers and travel sellers actually use:
- Direct to travelers: Sabre MCP currently powers applications available in ChatGPT and Claude — a direct path to travelers that airlines did not have to build themselves. Virgin Australia recently received the Skift 2026 IDEA Award for “Rethinking Flight Search with Conversational AI.” This award-winning innovation is powered by Sabre’s MCP architecture.
- Direct to agencies and TMCs: Internova, including Global Travel Collection, Nexion, ALTOUR, and Travel Leaders Network, is using Sabre’s MCP server to build a new generation of service automation to achieve radical efficiency.
- Platform-wide products: The Air, Hotel, Agency, and Payments lines function on the basis of Sabre Mosaic, supported by the Sabre IQ intelligence layer — which is why Sabre can move from airlines to hotels (MindTrip, BizTrip) without having to rebuild everything from scratch.
“The industry rebuilt airline merchandising and distribution methods with NDC,” said Shawn Williams, Chief Operating Officer. “We believe MCP will be the next great transformation in how travel is bought and sold in the world of AI. We are working hard on this in parallel with our leadership in NDC. The difference is that this time, Sabre is not following a standard — we are paving the way first.”
About Sabre
Advancing the revolution of autonomous AI agents in travel. Sabre is a technology leader with artificial intelligence at its core, supported by one of the world’s largest travel data clouds. Using AI as a foundation and operating at unprecedented scale, Sabre turns insights into innovation, helping airlines, hoteliers, agencies, and other partners sell, distribute, and organize travel around the world. Sabre is built on an open, modular cloud architecture and serves as the foundation for both established leaders and bold new innovators, guiding them into a new era of travel retail through intelligent, interconnected, and personalized capabilities. For more information, visit www.sabre.com.
