One-on-One: Sabre's Tom Klein Sees European Growth, Additional Hotel Content

Sabre Travel Network and Airline Solutions president Tom Klein this week spoke with EuroBTN editor Seth Harris about Sabre's recent growth in Europe and its continued efforts to add hotel content into the global distribution system.

BTN: What recent gains has Sabre made with European travel agencies?

Tom Klein: In Europe, the GDS side is still our biggest growth opportunity. Whether it's Spain, France or Germany, in some of the really big travel markets in Europe we feel under-represented. In Germany, we are growing. In France, we are growing. We have good opportunities outside of the United States. We just need to keep plowing along.

In that business, we get help from some of our big global customers. In some parts of Europe, we've done really well serving the online players. In a lot of these markets, you have fairly long-term contracts with agencies and it's a bit of a slog. You keep pounding away and hope you get your product investments right to be attractive to customers. We've been on the right side of that. We see our marketshare in the GDS business globally growing.

BTN: How are you growing that share in Europe?

Klein: In the corporate end-to-end process and being able to service a corporation on a global basis. You'll find very few examples of our competitors being awarded business on a real multinational basis. We've done really well in that space.

While growth has slowed in the online travel side, in some markets it is still fast-growing. If you went back seven or eight years, people would say, "great product, but it's built for the Americas." We're over that. Global customers know that they can use our product. We've started to penetrate markets like Germany and France and we have good-sized local travel agents converting to Sabre and using our product.

On the global account side, which includes both global accounts and the large travel agencies, we've grown with them into new markets. We've really benefited from companies like Cisco and more recently Accenture that have said they're going to have a single GDS globally.

BTN: What role do financial inducements play in European competition?

Klein: It's part of the mix. We don't generally think of ourselves as a price leader. In fact, as we look and measure and we do a better job at product investment, we can show the customers the financial benefit of using our products. I don't feel like we are a company that is out there buying business. We are doing a pretty good job of competing with a bigger basket of attributes.

BTN: Amadeus recently has made significant investments in the United States, where the company has not been nearly as big as in its home European markets. Is what Amadeus has done a response to the progress you have made in Europe?

Klein: They are a good competitor. The United States is still the biggest travel market in the world, so it's logical for them to spend some money here and see if anything good can happen. We like our competitive position in North America. There has been a little bit of consolidation in our industry. There are three big players. The world is only so big, and there are not great growth characteristics around the world right now, so to grow in the GDS business you have to take it out of somebody else's pocket.

BTN: How are you going about adding new hotel content into your GDS channel?

Klein: Increasingly, there have been successful aggregators who have pulled local content together. We are finding new ways to work with them and connect to them. Basically, XML connectivity into aggregators allows us to jump by thousands of properties in a relatively short period of time. The difficulty is that just having the content doesn't win the day. People are used to buying in a certain way, so it's a longer evolution.

When you are in a market like Europe, where on the GDS side in some markets we are a decent-size player but generally not the leader in many markets, it's hard for us to change the buying behavior of the market. We can put the hotels in and will get some incremental upside, and give them more access to customers perhaps, but changing the way people buy is a bit of a slog.

BTN: How does the increased content affect corporate buying?

Klein: There continues to be opportunities to at least offer more options to corporations than what they historically looked at. There certainly is an upside. A lot of it has to do with making it easier for these aggregators to connect. For corporations in particular, it's more frustrating than we'd like it to be. They have less control in some markets in the visibility into where their employees want to stay, where they are spending money what's important to their travelers. That is harder for them when they are not distributing through a single source.