Vatican-based travel organisation, Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi (ORP) has chosen Sabre, to help create new opportunities for travellers to visit Rome and other holy destinations relevant to their faith. ORP, which organises pilgrimages and holy tour packages around Europe, is now expanding its presence online with the newly launched ‘Journeys of the Spirit’ travel portal. Launched in March, the portal enables travellers from all over the world to book flights and tour packages to religious sites.

Sabre becomes ORP’s preferred global distribution systems (GDS) provider through this multi-year partnership, supplying a range of advanced travel solutions to facilitate the shopping and booking of travel through the new josp.com website:

• Josp.com will use air content from Sabre’s online travel website Travelocity.com, to provide travellers with combined air and ground packages. Making Travelocity’s air content available on josp.com (known as white labelling) makes travel to the Vatican City and other religious sites around Europe instantly available for pilgrims all over the world and accelerates ORP’S mission to make its packages more globally available 
• ORP travel agents will use Sabre’s advanced desktop solution, MySabre, for all its shopping and booking requirements with full access to all of Sabre’s GDS content including more than 400 airlines, more than 80,000 hotels and 26 car rental companies 
• ORP’s tour packages will be made available on Sabre’s Southern Europe local content platform, providing Sabre Connected agents in Italy, Greece and Spain with fully integrated access to ORP content through MySabre.

“Our goal is to provide pilgrims all over the world with full access to our product portfolio in a simplified and streamlined way. We chose Sabre as our partner because they are the only company to offer a truly unique blend of technology solutions, distribution power and expertise to enable us to achieve our goals,” said Father Ceasar Atuire, CEO of Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi.

Senior Vice President for Sabre Travel Network EMEA Martin Cowley said: “We feel privileged and honoured that ORP has selected Sabre to help them make their travel packages more widely available to Catholics and pilgrims around the world. They told us they wanted to enhance awareness and reach of their travel packages, and that’s exactly what we’re providing through our unique combination of travel agency services and online travel website, Travelocity.com.  I’m pleased we’ve made this happen in a way that meets ORP’s needs and provides even more opportunities for devotees to use the Church’s own travel services.

“The launch of josp.com is an exciting opportunity, and we’re delighted to be facilitating the gift of travel to some of the most sacred and religious destinations on Earth,” said Cowley.