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December 6, 2001 - reprinted with permission from the Interactive Travel Report
Sabre urges agencies to use more online tools; explores ITV
Responding to what it sees as a definite trend toward increased online bookings, Sabre said it wants to help its travel agency customers aggressively move their businesses online through a suite of Internet booking engine solutions under the Sabre.res banner.
During a conference call held earlier this week, Ellen Keszler, senior vice president, Sabre travel agency solutions, said Sabre believes traditional offline-only channels and reservation offices will see “significant booking declines” as online channels make more gains. Specifically, Sabre estimates that by 2004 the traditional (offline) travel agency will only capture 41 percent of the overall travel business (compared with 56 percent last year). Sabre expects market share for online channels will increase from 13 percent in 2001 to 31 percent in 2004, and supplier-direct bookings will decline from 31 percent last year to 28 percent in three years.
As a result, Keszler said, Sabre has “focused its strategy to facilitate moving customers online.”
Sabre hopes to accomplish that by pushing its customizable Sabre.res suite of booking engines to more agencies. The company has already found success using Sabre.res to power major clients’ sites, including those of STA Travel, Volando.com, Swissair, Austrian Airlines, Northwest Airlines and KLM.
Under the Sabre.res banner, small travel resellers can use the Essentia.res product, which is priced at $50 per month and can be set up on a Web site within a few days. For medium-sized travel resellers, Sabre offers the Meridia.res solution that is more customizable and comes with a $30,000 licensing fee and monthly maintenance fees of about $1,000 per month. Medium-to-large travel resellers with highly unique needs are more likely to find use in the Optima.res tool, which starts off with a $100,000 licensing fee and includes options for custom development that could range from $2,000 to $10,000 per month.
Potential clients for Sabre.res include corporations as well. Sabre’s next big installation is Dillard’s, one of the nation’s largest department stores. The company will upgrade to the Meridia.res booking tool on its dillards.com site starting early next year. Dillard’s said it anticipates a 200 percent increase in its online travel bookings within one year, and plans to support the launch of its new travel section with an aggressive marketing campaign.
Sabre said that the benefits to users of the Sabre.res platform include: having a choice of languages and currencies; being able to offer negotiated fares; adding revenue through banner ad placement; and allowing for multiple GDS connectivity.
For the GDS that brought us Travelocity.com, Sabre’s com-mitment to online bookings should not be a surprise. However, Sabre’s affirmation of Internet technology is still being tempered with caveats about the benefits of using a human agent. “No one should underestimate the power of advice, the value of the human aspect of the business, having that relationship with the customer and providing a higher level of service,” said Keszler.
Indeed, despite its own forecasts of channel shift toward online bookings, Sabre said it is possible that traditional agencies may not be in such bad shape—traditional agencies might in fact make up as much as 19 percent of the future growth of “online agencies.” Also, agencies may benefit from an increase in online bookings direct to suppliers. If suppliers open up the online chan-nel to agents and provide them with agent-specific bookings sites, agents can essentially move to the more efficient Internet channel bookings previously made via the telephone.
Sabre plans new technology
As for the future of this technology, Sabre said it is positioning itself for a world where the Internet is just another point of sale for agents to exploit.
Keszler said technologies such as Interactive TV, while not a big driving force in the industry right now, have potential. “With increased bandwidth and more integration, it is a future potential medium,” she said, adding that Sabre has been work-ing with potential ITV partners for “a number of years.”
Jeff Harmon, senior vice president, Sabre online travel solu-tions, explained that Sabre is also building its booking platforms with services that are XML-oriented to allow them to be accessed by multiple point-of-sale devices. “We don’t have proprietary interfaces. If ITV gets used, our Sabre products will be able to plug into that very simply and easily,” he said.
All these changes are part of Sabre’s effort to “reinvent travel,” said Keszler. Furthermore, this shift will ultimately require familiarity with interactive technologies. “You need to embrace new technologies to succeed long-term.”
