MCP Is the New NDC -- Is This Travel's Shift-to-Streaming Moment?

While competitors announce plans to modernize, Sabre already has — and its customers are live and benefiting from AI because of it.

SOUTHLAKE, Texas, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- While some in travel tech are still writing press releases about plans for agentic AI, Sabre (NASDAQ: SABR) already shipped it.

The travel industry spent the past decade navigating NDC. Sabre has invested significantly in NDC and is a leader in this space. With a view that the industry may spend the next decade running on MCP, Sabre already has a one-year head start with shopping and booking and is in production with servicing capabilities.

In September 2025, Sabre launched its MCP server — the connective layer that lets AI agents book, sell and service travel directly on Sabre's data and inventory. Today, it's not a roadmap. It's reality. Sabre has nearly 80 customers both piloting and in full production mode, leveraging its MCP server, including Virgin Australia, Flight Centre, Internova, including Global Travel Collection, Nexion, ALTOUR and Travel Leaders Network, already generating real savings and real bookings.

That's the gap the rest of the industry hasn't closed. Competitors are announcing the modernization moves Sabre made long ago. Every "new AI partnership" headline this quarter is proof of how far behind the pack still is.

The opportunity is enormous, and the runway to seize it is short. Bessemer Venture Partners State of AI 2025 named end-to-end agentic travel booking as one of the largest unclaimed opportunities in consumer AI. It requires decades of airline and hotel commercial logic, proprietary travel data, and integrations no point solution or foundation model can replicate on its own. Sabre is in rare air in this way, operating a global travel data cloud at meaningful scale.

Sabre's agentic footprint is already live across every channel travelers and travel sellers actually use:

• Direct to travelers: Sabre MCP is powering apps live inside ChatGPT and Claude today — a direct front door to travelers that airlines didn't have to build themselves. Virgin Australia recently won the Skift 2026 IDEA award for "Redefining Flight Search Through 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 leveraging Sabre's MCP server to build the next generation of servicing automation to drive radical efficiency.
• Products across the platform: Air, Hotel, Agency, Payments run on Sabre Mosaic, underpinned by Sabre's intelligence layer, Sabre IQ — the reason Sabre can move from airline to hotel (MindTrip, BizTrip) without rebuilding from scratch.

"The industry rebuilt how airlines merchandise and distribute using NDC," said Shawn Williams, Chief Operating Officer. "We believe MCP is the next great transformation of how travel is bought and sold in the world of AI. We have been running hard at this, in parallel to our NDC leadership. The difference is, this time Sabre isn't following the standard — we're the ones blazing the trail."

About Sabre 
Powering the agentic revolution in travel. Sabre is an AI-native technology leader, backed by one of the world's largest travel data clouds. With AI at its core and operating at unparalleled scale, Sabre transforms insights into innovation, empowering airlines, hoteliers, agencies and other partners to retail, distribute and fulfill travel worldwide. Sabre is built on an open, modular, cloud-native architecture and serves as the backbone for both established leaders and bold, new disruptors, guiding them to the next age of travel retailing through intelligent, connected, and personalized experiences. For more information visit www.sabre.com.

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SOURCE Sabre Corporation