Sabre Socializing Itineraries For The (Midmarket) Enterprise

Republished with permission from The Beat.

The Beat ~ a travel business newsletter
New York City
March 9, 2010

Sabre's planned integration of itineraries from the GetThere corporate self-booking tool with the firm's cubeless enterprise social network service, hinted at last year, is "most imminent" for Sabre's internal, cubeless-powered Sabre Town community, according to a spokesman. Also to be made available to clients, the connection would allow participating travelers to see where their co-workers are traveling, potentially boosting en-route productivity. GetThere and cubeless currently share no corporate clients, but Sabre is packaging the cubeless offering into a GetThere midmarket solution that includes a variety of services, a revamped pricing model and new incentives for travel management company resellers.

Similar itinerary-driven social functionality is available through the new TripIt Groups service. Outside the enterprise, TripIt and WorldMate users also can automatically share their travel plans with members of their personal LinkedIn networks. This sort of trip plan sharing takes to another level what were once merely automated emails to spouses and calendar invitations to specified business contacts.

"It makes people more productive on the road," said TripIt co-founder Gregg Brockway when describing the concept last month during The Masters Program in Washington, D.C. "I don't have time to flip through my rolodex to see who might happen to be in DC, but it's nice to see who is here, in case I want to squeeze in an extra breakfast or dinner meeting."

"Maybe itineraries are not made available to everyone, but maybe they are to anyone in your company or department," said Orbitz for Business president Frank Petito, also speaking at The Masters Program. "It could be a useful application. There's a healthy degree of policy management that would be brought to the equation with social networking. People will tread carefully, but it will become more prevalent."

With its PNR Acquire function, GetThere also will send into cubeless passenger name records stored by agents in the Sabre global distribution system. Part of the GetThere Collaboration Suite announced in September, cubeless itself has more than 30 corporate, non-profit and trade association organizations with 120,000 professionals as users, and is billed as an "online community platform that allows organizations to tap into the collective intelligence of their employees or members … for secure internal company or organization use."

According to the Sabre official, travel agencies "have been quick to draw upon the benefits of cubeless. Sabre's AgentStream community, based on cubeless technology, has more than 2,000 business and leisure agents participating today, representing hundreds of agencies." American Express Business Travel announced more than two years ago that it was partnering with Sabre on the launch of cubeless, and an Amex official this week indicated that the firms continue to collaborate. Asked about Amex, the Sabre official responded: "We are in various stages of progress with several travel management companies who are considering deployment of cubeless to better support travel programs and business travelers."

Meanwhile, Go Midmarket

"Since deployment of the cubeless solution has implications beyond travel management, larger companies are doing their due diligence around items such as corporate culture, CIO guidelines, etc., as they consider the benefits and reach of the solution," according to the Sabre spokesman. But as part of the new GetThere midmarket offering, cubeless is one of several items bundled together for companies with 500 to 5,000 employees and less than $5 million in travel expenses.

Other standard components, priced per employee and per month rather than on transactions, include policy-driven bookings, remote conferencing facilitation "in the decision path" and meetings management by Worktopia. Options for expense management and consulting services generate a higher fee. Sabre takes on the customer "service and support model" with this program, said GetThere president and Sabre Travel Network senior vice president Chris Kroeger.

For TMC partners who resell the midmarket suite, Kroeger said Sabre also is willing to pay "a revenue share to the TMC for the customers they bring to this offering, and depending on the size of the midsize company, it can be $1,500 to $12,000 for the one-time referral fee. In this new model we can expand the number of TMCs who can have GetThere in their portfolio because we can service and support it at a lower volume level."

He said there were "a couple thousand midsize corporations using GetThere today through their TMCs."

~ Jay Campbell

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