Sonic Is On A Roll

An understated press release recently came out that announced Jetblue has chosen SabreSonic as their new host system. It gives a hint of JetBlue branching out to expand partnerships:

Rick Zeni, JetBlue's Vice President of Change Management-Passenger Service System. "Sabre will allow JetBlue to offer greater revenue-producing codeshare and interline partnership opportunities... "

A few notes:

- Looks like some consultant got the final say to Zeni's title "Change Management - PSS"?

- This is actually the second announcement of Sabre scoring a host win in 2009 – the other being a recent WestJet announcement. We know that Amad-oose is pounding the market with Altea – but Sabresonic has some momentum going for it.

- Even more interestingly – both of these airlines used to be on the Navitaire platform. JetBlue probably decided to look around since they had to migrate to the New Skies platform anyway. It just seems telling that Navitaire wasn’t able to keep Jetblue in the fold despite all of the features New Skies is supposed to add.

- The timing is also interesting right after Sabre's purchase of EB2. We assume that Sabre is planning to incorporate EB2 as their new IBE platform (the Frontier migration to Datalex would have been the first clue they had to do something) – but we wonder if JetBlue will be the launch partner for that platform (or Westjet).

- The press release says that Jetblue will take control of Sonic in 2010. FMV is always amazed at how long integrations projects like this take, so we’ll be watching to see if JetBlue is any different. We'll also see if they can implement the IBE in that timeframe as well.

- Finally, we can’t help but love the name “Sabresonic”. It always reminds us of “Sonic the Hedgehog” which is one of our favorite video games. Any reason to dredge up Sonic once again is ok in our book. Though "Grand Theft Airline" has a snappy, edgy ring to it, too... Maybe next time.