For over half a century, the world’s airlines have clung to a fossilised pricing system that could be displayed in a museum case between a DC-3 propeller and an old Pan Am timetable.
Now, in a move that may finally prise open those creaking fare buckets, travel-tech heavyweight Sabre Corporation has unveiled an AI-powered marvel that promises to rewrite the way airlines make money and perhaps, how passengers buy tickets.
It’s called the Continuous Revenue Optimiser, or CRO for short, and it’s already drawing murmurs from boardrooms to booking desks. Built in partnership with the ambitious new Riyadh Air, the technology abandons the traditional “fare class” system — those mysterious letters determining whether you’re sipping Champagne or clutching a stale biscuit in row 47. It replaces it with live, adaptive pricing.
The idea is audaciously simple: every seat, traveller, and search will be individually priced in real time.
A System That Thinks Before You Blink
Sabre’s CRO runs on Sabre IQ, a digital brain fed over 50 petabytes of anonymised travel data, enough information to make HAL 9000 feel underqualified. The system constantly analyses demand, booking behaviour, market shifts, and competitor activity.
In plain English, it helps airlines offer the right price to customers at the right time.
And the potential payoff? According to Sabre, as much as a 3.5 per cent revenue uplift without adding a single seat. The kind of margin bump sends chief financial officers to reach for the good Scotch for an airline that is shifting billions of dollars a year.
“The next paradigm shift in revenue optimisation is here,” said Mike Reyes, Sabre’s Senior Vice President of Product Management. “We’re thrilled to be making this technical leap forward with Riyadh Air, a likeminded partner who’s gone on the journey with us to re-imagine what the future of revenue optimisation can look like.”
Riyadh Air Takes the Leap
The partnership isn’t merely symbolic. Riyadh Air, Saudi Arabia’s sleek new flag-carrier-in-waiting, is the first airline on Earth to deploy the system — a coup for a company that hasn’t yet flown a paying passenger.
Shihaj Kutty, the airline’s Vice President of Pricing and Revenue Management, puts it plainly: “With a digitally-savvy population to serve, we knew we needed cutting-edge technology to understand our customers in new ways, so that we could present relevant and optimised offers at the time of search and shop.”
Riyadh Air’s willingness to dive head-first into classless pricing speaks volumes about its ambitions and Sabre’s credibility. After all, this is an industry famous for cautious pilots and even more cautious accountants.
Legacy carriers have relied on fare buckets labelled Y, J, F and their alphabetic kin, a relic of paper tickets and telex machines for decades. CRO wipes that slate clean, replacing it with fluid, continuous pricing, updated on the fly. It’s as if the world’s most complicated Sudoku puzzle suddenly solved itself.
From Guesswork to Algorithm
Traditional revenue managers, often armed with coffee, spreadsheets, and a prayer, juggle seat inventory like carnival performers. Sabre’s new tool replaces much of that manual calculation with machine learning that adjusts prices automatically, responding to market fluctuations the moment they occur.
Reyes explains: “Continuous Revenue Optimizer applies the science of real-time pricing to airline retailing in a way that helps airlines meet customer and business objectives while moving to a fully modern offer-and-order environment.”
Translation: CRO takes what used to be a week-long analytical headache and turns it into a split-second decision.
Smarter for Airlines, Fairer for Travellers
Critics might fear that more AI means pricier seats, but the opposite may often occur in practice. The algorithm can lower fares when it senses untapped demand, filling planes that might otherwise fly half-empty.
“When evaluating technology to meet this need, what set CRO apart was its approach to segment-based continuous pricing, allowing us to balance commercial performance with traveller value, all while supporting long-term growth,” Kutty said.
In theory, passengers gain a fairer shake: the system considers genuine demand and timing rather than rigid fare buckets or opaque algorithms that punish procrastination. The endgame, Sabre insists, is not gouging but precision, a price that makes sense for both sides of the counter.
Closing a Decades-Old Gap
An MIT study backs Sabre’s optimism, suggesting that classless, segmented pricing can increase airline revenue by 3 to 6 per cent under real-world conditions. That number perks up entire executive suites for an industry still emerging from pandemic losses and fuel-price spikes.
The innovation also closes a long-lamented gap between modern e-commerce’s speed and airline pricing’s sluggishness. While Amazon or Uber can adjust prices in milliseconds, many airlines still work with systems conceived when the Boeing 707 was the pride of the skies.
Sabre’s CRO is the long-awaited bridge or, as one analyst quipped at the T2RL Engage conference where the system debuted, “the moment airline pricing joined the 21st century.”
The Conference That Got the Industry Talking
At T2RL Engage, where Sabre unveiled CRO alongside Riyadh Air executives, industry insiders reportedly packed the keynote hall to standing-room only. The enthusiasm wasn’t just for a shiny new acronym. It was for the sense that something genuinely transformative was finally taking flight.
Sabre Mosaic™, the broader modular platform supporting CRO, has spawned 16 products across 10 airlines, generating millions in extra revenue. That’s not a promise, that’s a track record.
A New Kind of Competition
Sabre’s move is a gauntlet thrown squarely across the tarmac for rival tech providers still tinkering with legacy systems. Continuous pricing could soon become the industry norm, not the novelty.
More intriguingly, CRO may alter the delicate relationship between airlines and online travel agencies. If every airline can fine-tune pricing in real time, the days of mass-market fare scraping and bulk discounts might be numbered.
In other words, the machine has learned to negotiate politely, but firmly.
The Verdict
It’s easy to get lost in the buzzwords AI, continuous optimisation, and modular intelligence, but at heart, this story is about the oldest challenge in aviation: how to fill seats profitably without annoying passengers. Sabre’s innovation doesn’t just tweak the formula; it changes the arithmetic altogether.
If it works as advertised, the next time you book a flight and notice a fare that seems almost eerily reasonable, you might have a clever bit of Sabre code to thank.
Or as an old Qantas yield manager might say, “the computer finally learned what we’ve been trying to tell it since 1973.”
By Jason Smith
BIO
Jason Smith has the kind of story you can’t fake, built on long flights, new cities, and that unmistakable hum of hotel life that gets under your skin and never quite leaves. Half American, half Asian, he grew up surrounded by the steady rhythm of the tourism trade in the U.S., where his family helped others see the world long before he did.
Eager to carve out his own path, Jason packed his bags for Bangkok and the Asian Institute of Hospitality & Management, where he majored in Hotel Management and found a career and a calling. From there came years on the road, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam — each stop adding another thread to his craft.
He made his mark in Thailand, eventually becoming Director of Sales for one of the country’s leading hotel chains. Then came COVID-19: borders closed, flights grounded, and a new chapter began.
Back home in America, Jason turned his knack for connection into words, joining Global Travel Media to tell the stories behind the check-ins written with the same warmth and honesty that have always defined him.
