One-On-One With Sabre's Sam Gilliland: CEO Sees Distribution Evolution

BTN editors last month spoke with Sabre CEO Sam Gilliland to discuss the travel distribution outlook, airline merchandizing initiatives and the next generation of the company's corporate travel offerings.

Business Travel News: We've recently heard your competitors say booking softness has spread outside of the United States, which was not the case earlier in the year. Are you seeing similar trends?

Sam Gilliland: What we're seeing is reflective of what you also see in terms of economic news around the world. We have the softening economy here, which has led to softer bookings in the United States. You have seen some of the economic news in the United Kingdom, and it's not going swimmingly there either. That softness seems to have moved to continental Europe as well. More recently, we've also been seeing in the bookings that it's getting soft in Asia. It goes into what appears to be a global cycle.

BTN: What is the latest on Sabre's airline unbundling and merchandizing initiatives?

Gilliland: We are working to stay in front, as best we can, of the introductions of new product and service offerings of the airlines. As you might imagine, the airlines are getting aggressive about those add-ons beyond the base fare applied to a person in a seat. They are getting more aggressive about the additional fees there. Our merchandizing efforts are around both accommodating what the airlines want to accomplish, but also trying to get to standards that allow that to be understandable to the consumer, whether that is a corporate or a leisure consumer. We have been working with a number of different airlines and travel agency customers to understand better how we can make those services available without driving significant inefficiencies. You might add a fee onto the front end of the process, but it drops a lot of costs onto the back end as it changes. We need to be mindful in the merchandizing process of the end-to-end process.

BTN: Are those developed on a one-off basis with individual carriers or is it an industrywide solution that you put in place to address the overarching trend?

Gilliland: We've obviously built those so we can accommodate the needs of a specific carrier, but extend it to many carriers. It's typical in the way we do a lot of our development. We may get a request from an individual travel management company that makes sense more broadly, so we build that not only to accommodate travel management company X, but also Y and Z. We are doing the same things with the airlines. The other piece of this is, are we building it in a way that we can get to standards and an understandable set of services? There are a number of interesting innovations in branded fares and unbundled capabilities, but we want to eliminate some of the confusion during the shopping and purchasing process.

Airlines, particularly in this market of fuel prices, need more revenue. That in turn leads to products and services they want to charge for, and because it's so difficult for them to raise base fares, that's the direction they've headed toward. We need to help them accomplish their goals and ensure that we help the corporations or consumers accomplish their goals as well.

BTN: Describe the convergence within Sabre between GetThere and what you provide travel agents.

Gilliland: One thing I'd point to is our enterprise profiles, which we'll be rolling out over the next couple of months. This is a common profile that you'll see in the corporation for that traveler who's being serviced, but that's a little more behind-the-scenes. We have to keep the corporate desktop clean and simple, whereas the agents, who have a great deal more expertise in servicing a booking, will have more tools at their disposal. You won't expose everything on a corporate desktop, obviously, but a lot of the underlying technologies and data we'll offer to both will be the same. An example of that might be connections to suppliers and ensuring that we have all the content available through a wholly sourced desktop, where you have connections to different content from multiple sources. You'll see that sort of content flowing into the agent desktop and GetThere desktop in a very similar fashion.

You've likely seen the convergence of the consumer desktop in Travelocity with the GetThere desktop at many corporations. We've heard a lot of feedback over the years around this desire for the corporate desktop to look a lot more like what many employees were using to book leisure travel. They're very familiar with Travelocity and Expedia and Orbitz and they wanted a similar look and feel for GetThere. What you've seen over the last couple of years is a convergence of the user interface and even some of the underlying data we've exposed to corporations, and much of that has come from a convergence of the GetThere and Travelocity front-end desktops.

BTN: How do you define "open systems" and what does that mean for the multi-GDS environment today and in the future?

Gilliland: Our customers require access to more and more information from our systems. From a very high, macro-level view, this is all about information access. Open systems need to be about the types of enablement that we provide to travel management customers and corporations to get the information they need. Some of that comes from the user interfaces we offer up and some comes from Web services. My high- level philosophy is that the underlying technologies and capabilities are less important, so long as you're exposing the information and the services that your customer needs. Customers really shouldn't have to worry about whether we've got an HP Blade server running underneath or what type of operating system we're employing, as long as they can get at the information they need.

We have moved aggressively toward open systems in terms of the hardware platforms, the operating systems, and the application layers that sit on top of that. The reason the customer might care about that is, as you move to open systems, you should be able to increase the capabilities of the system more rapidly than with some of the technology from five years ago or a decade ago.

We were very aggressive eight or nine years ago in moving to open systems technology and we have seen over the last couple of years the fruits of that, not only by providing a shopping and pricing platform that works all over the world, but what we can continuously improve and improve rapidly. If we see a changing environment in terms of airline pricing, we can move very quickly and adapt with the new open systems technology that really underlies our shopping and pricing.

We've been very aggressively migrating our systems toward open systems. Getting to your multi-source point, it wraps right back around to the accessibility I described earlier. If you're connecting to multiple systems—whether that's multiple GDSs or other sources of content you need access to—you need to have very flexible input-output to and from those systems.

BTN: What are some examples of "other sources of content?"

Gilliland: One is hotels. You have very successful hotel aggregators around the world and we'd like to make their content available to the GDS. There is a set of disciplines we have to apply to the type of content that comes in, but also a flexibility around the connections to that content that we need to have available as we work with those third parties.

BTN: Do you anticipate more direct relationships as companies grow more multinational and global?

Gilliland: We'll continue to see a mix. We have very strong relationships with travel management companies around the world. We can also work well on a direct basis if need be. One of our large focus areas is to be sure we can offer up a global service that a multinational desires. We are offering our service in more markets around the world than any other GDS or booking tool provider. We will grow into markets, sometimes pressed by corporations to grow in that market. India would be an example where we operate through Abacus but we have large corporate customers saying they want to work directly with us in those markets.