Sabre Corp. is developing a technology platform that will bring together hospitality content from multiple sources under the banner of Sabre Content Services for Lodging.

The company plans to begin a rollout in the first quarter of 2018, Traci Mercer, Sabre’s senior vice president of lodging, ground and sea, said.

The platform will, of course, draw from the Sabre GDS, but also from non-GDS sources, such as OTAs with a wide range of hospitality content and from non-traditional sources, such as a very small wholesaler in France.

The content will include “alternative accommodations,” such as private home rentals and vacation properties.

The platform also will draw from aggregators, re-distributors and agency-sourced hotel content.

Aggregating hospitality content is nothing new, but Mercer said the new platform will stand out in a very significant way: It will provide an environment for true comparison shopping.

Sabre said the goal is to provide buyers and consumers of GDS content with access to more options and a more consistent shopping experience to include the way content is displayed at the room and rate level.

When Mercer joined Sabre 10 months ago, the company was looking at its role in hotel distribution. “Increasingly, we were seeing customers booking outside the GDS, and we wanted to know why,” she said.

“Full content” in the hospitality sector is “a bit of a misnomer,” Mercer said. It’s “all over the place” and is not as easily categorized as airline content.

“We saw that if you’re out there trying to solve this problem, you have to build out your own solutions,’ she said.

The new solution will include the capabilities of Sabre APIs and will be incorporated across all Sabre points-of-sale: Sabre Red Workspace, its agency desktop; GetThere, its corporate booking system, and TripCase, its mobile trip organizer and communications device.

Sabre said it will provide tools for both buyers and suppliers of lodging content to better manage chain, property, and rate-level preferred content.

Mercer said that although the rollout will not begin until next year, “the timing is perfect” for an announcement now, when everyone involved – suppliers and buyers – is working on budgets for next year.