Aven Adds New Booking Engine as Hotels Push Direct Sales

Aven Hospitality, the former Sabre hospitality business, has launched a new Booking Engine, giving hotels a cleaner way to turn website visitors into direct guests.

The tool keeps the full reservation process inside the hotel’s own website.

For hotels, direct bookings reduce reliance on third-party platforms and give hotels more control over the guest relationship.

Aven targets the final step before booking

The new engine is focused on travelers who are already on a hotel website. It is not mainly a marketing tool for bringing in new traffic. Instead, it helps hotels convert people who may already be close to making a reservation.

Aven says hotels can use the system to show rooms, rates, services, upgrades, and payment options in one booking flow. This gives properties more flexibility to sell more than the room itself. For example, a hotel can present add-ons or flexible payment choices before the guest checks out.

Mark Hollyhead, Aven’s chief transformation officer, said the product is meant to solve a long-running problem in hotel technology. “Hotels have been forced to stitch together fragmented booking, retailing, and distribution technologies that were never designed to work together as a unified commerce platform,” he said.

The product follows Aven’s split from Sabre

Aven was previously Sabre Hospitality Solutions, a major hotel technology business inside Sabre. In 2025, TPG acquired the unit for $1.1 billion and turned it into a standalone company.

This makes the Booking Engine an important early product for Aven’s new chapter. The company already supports more than 35,000 hotels through SynXis and related systems. SynXis helps hotels manage rates, availability, reservations, and distribution across booking channels.

With the new engine, Aven is trying to show that it can modernize hotel commerce, not only maintain older reservation technology. The launch also shows how hotel tech providers are trying to connect booking, retailing, payments, and distribution in a more unified way.

Navarino gives Aven an early test case

Navarino Services is one of the first partners using the new Booking Engine. The UK-based company manages distribution for around 800 independent hotels.

Richard Duff, CEO of Navarino Services, said the first results were already visible during the pilot. “In the first month of our properties being live on Aven’s new Booking Engine pilot, we’ve already seen revenue growth of over 30 percent with no additional demand-generating activity in play,” he said.

That result suggests the pilot helped hotels convert more of the traffic they already had, rather than relying on extra marketing spend. Still, Aven has not yet shared wider data from more hotel groups or regions. The bigger test will be whether similar results appear across different property types and markets.

Aven is linking direct booking with AI-ready distribution

The Booking Engine follows Aven’s March 2026 update around Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP helps hotels make their official rates, availability, and content easier for AI-powered travel tools to read and use.

The launch also comes as AI tools begin to influence who controls hotel discovery and bookings. Booking Holdings warned that platforms such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini could become new gatekeepers in hotel distribution. For hotels, this makes direct booking technology more important.

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