Roughly 400 developers walked into a Sabre hackathon recently in Mountain View — and skipped the search box, writes Travel Technology and AI Reporter, Adriana Lee. Instead, they went after the stuff travel's never digitized: voice agents that call hotels for answers, pull scattered reservations into one place, and rebuild trips when flight plans fall apart.

Beyond the tech, the event was a bid by Sabre to court outside developers, opening its back-end systems through APIs and an agentic marketplace. That kind of openness is still rare: Expedia, Booking.com, and Amadeus have largely kept their core systems closed or partner-limited, leaving unresolved how far — and to whom — travel's AI tech tools should open up.

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That is more than 2,000 aircraft per year for the next two decades, roughly 20% more than the industry has ever delivered in its best year.

In this bonus episode of Airline Weekly Lounge, Gordon Smith and Meghna Maharishi sit down with Boeing's Vice President of Commercial Marketing Darren Hulst to break down what that demand outlook actually means for airlines, manufacturers, and the future of the global fleet

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