New automated credit card payment capabilities expand to the largest Latin America business travel market. The solution streamlines settlement of hotel reservations for TMCs, as showcased at this week’s LACTE conference with new integration to Brazilian Reais and fully supports a Portuguese language user experience

SAO PAULO, Feb. 24, 2015Sabre Corporation (NASDAQ: SABR), together with payment services partner Conferma, announced the upcoming release of Sabre Virtual Payments, a software solution enhanced with customized capabilities and built with the most secure payment card technology available in Brazil.

The initial launch, planned for early April, will support hotel bookings and is designed to support an increasingly complex segment within corporate travel programs: solving the need to manually reconcile bookings against payment by fully automating this process, thus resulting in substantial efficiency and cost savings for travel management companies. Available for GetThere customers, Sabre’s software solution also enables transactions to be processed in Brazilian Reais, thereby avoiding exchange fees that would otherwise be charged to cards issued in foreign currencies.

Sabre Virtual Payments is a seamless form of payment that allows agencies, TMCs and corporations to deploy single use virtual credit and prepaid card numbers, securely created at the time they shop and book for hotels both online and offline. The unique virtual card number provides stronger fraud protection and is PCI compliant, while also securing control on the exact charged amount of any single transaction.

As featured at the 10th LACTE annual conference in Sao Paulo this week, Mastercard is the first partner to provide the solution. In addition to increasing travel policy compliance, improving reconciling processes, and providing robust reporting capabilities, agencies will benefit from better data integration and provide their corporate customers positive ROI on travel spend.

“While corporate travel remains an important investment to secure business and expand enterprise operations overseas, related payments continuously get exposed to difficult manual reconciliation and accounting processes,” said Yannis Karmis, vice president of Sabre’s corporate solutions. “We are pleased to partner with renowned bank and payments entities to offer an innovative solution that accelerates payment reconciling operations and real-time reporting of travel spend.”

The virtual technology, developed specifically for payments in the travel industry, also means expanded business opportunities for hoteliers, as rates and services will be available in a secure booking environment.

Sabre and Conferma will continue their work to make the solution available in other countries across Latin America in the coming months.

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