Stephen Fitzgerald
Since the introduction of rich media content on various hotel Web sites, hoteliers and some buyers have said they want those capabilities available via the global distribution systems. Although this functionality can lag behind the hotel companies' own sites, GDS provider Sabre Holdings argues that a lack of demand among travel agents is one reason the content is not available to them. Stephen Fitzgerald, chief operating officer for Sabre Hospitality Solutions, spoke with Management.travelrecently about this topic and new developments with Sabre's hotel request for proposals services provider BidStork, which Sabre bought a year ago. An excerpt of the conversation follows.
How does Sabre obtain rich media content?
Sabre has an agreement with VFM Leonardo. On the Travelocity side of our business, whatever a consumer is looking at--rich media, pictures, tours, etc.--those images and that content is pulled directly from VFM Leonardo and it’s not stored in Travelocity. On the GDS side, we use them as well, but we do not stream live video, moving pictures or tours onto the travel agent desktop; instead, VFM Leonardo populates our image database and then we pull from our existing image database on the Sabre side of the house. In both the case of GetThere and Travelocity, the consumer is booking the trip, so the Travelocity traveler has time to view pictures of their location, hotel and rich media. In GetThere, typically the traveler or their assistant is researching hotels and wants to see a greater number of photographs, movies, video and tours. The typical travel agent does not have the time to view rich media and moving videos of hotels that the individual travelers do, so there just hasn’t been that much demand on the travel agent GDS part of our business for that type of product.
Will rich media content ever be viewed in the GDS?
I think it will have to, but we are in a world right now where many agents like to use native GDS commandsbecause they are very fast. We do this demonstration oftentimes at conferences where we put two individuals on a stage: One is searching for hotels on Travelocity, and one is an experienced agent searching for a hotel on Sabre. By the time you fill in boxes and point and click with a mouse, the agent has the hotel booked every time because if you know the command set of the GDS and you know where you want to go, it is still faster using text commands in the GDS. Many agents are now saying, "I book in the GDS, but I am increasingly looking for information that exists outside the GDS and am having to go and look up hotel content elsewhere." That means that we are getting more agent demand for maps, photos and perhaps videos in the GDS channel. As agents express that demand, we will provide those products. Part of that is the natural evolution of the industry. As newer agents come into the business, they are used to graphical representations, pictures, maps and tours. To the extent that those agents demand those products, we will put them in the GDS as well. The industry is going that way. The infrastructure to show photographs and rich media exists now the MySabre interface is a graphical environment; it is just set up to present the view that most of our agents still want to view, which is a native GDS screen.
What else are you doing to access hotel content?
Between now and the end of the year, we will be moving to a world in which we connect with hotel partners via XML and have a richer, more flexible message set between the GDS and participating hotel chains. The first thing we are doing with our XML connectivity is we are bringing on hotel aggregators and tour companies to allow us to add hotels to Sabre that we have not had access to previously. By the end of the year, we are going to be implementing with our first two aggregators. Our first one is Boscolo Tours, an Italian tour company that will bring over 11,000 new hotels into Sabre that are mostly European, Middle Eastern and African focused, although they also have properties in Latin America and Asia Pacific. That is going to be followed with Hoteisnet, which is an aggregator that is going to bring us about 1,000 additional properties in Latin America. This content is going to be available in the host Sabre GDS, which means that all points of sale that consume Sabre have access to these hotels. We are configuring them to look like and book exactly like any other hotel in Sabre. So as an example, we are not sending agents out to a link at some other place to book these properties and then figuring out how to merge them back or not into the GDS. These properties are actually in the GDS, they behave like any other chain in the GDS, so travel agents booking them will be able to integrate them into their workflow, mid-office, back office and generate an itinerary.
Are these new initiatives to gain better scope in the fragmented European market?
In Europe, there are literally thousands of hotels that our agency customers want to book that have never been in the GDS and probably never will be. Oftentimes, they are 40- and 50-room properties or three- or four-star hotels in Rome or Paris or in secondary and tertiary cities throughout Europe. This is a great way to be able to reach out to those properties and pull them into the GDS. We are in pretty good shape with our hotel content in North America; however, in Europe because it is so much more of a fragmented market and because there are fewer hotels that belong to a chain on a percentage basis, we had to do this to reach out to those properties that we had not been previously able to connect with. It’s not efficient to send sales teams out to contract with 11,000 individual hotels. The aggregator connectivity allows the agent to be able to book those properties. They may have had to pick up the phone and call, fax or email before, and it also allows those hotels greater distribution reach through their aggregator into the GDS, so it is a win-win for both parties.
What have you been working on to improve the BidStork product offering?
Hotel Scout on the agency side and Lead Scout on the hotel side. It has been operational for about 90 days now. When a corporate customer completes a request for proposals, we go back to that customer and say, "By the way, we have a profile on the hotels that you are looking for and we think we know what you are after. Would you like to hear from other hotels that you have not reached out to that would like to compete for your business?" Generally the answer is yes, so we obtain permission from the corporation, put together a profile for that company and go to hotels that meet that profile and say, "We have corporations that are interested in hearing from you, would you like to make a bid for this corporation’s business?" We charge hotels $49 a month to receive those leads, which are screened [so the profile] matches their hotel. That business has been growing at the rate of about six hotels a day for the past 90 days. At the rate they are growing, we expect to have 1,500 to 2,000 properties on board by the end of the year. We think [the poor economy] is why we are growing at five or six hotels a day with pretty minimal solicitation. BidStork has their own database of properties that they built that is based on the GDS, but it is also built on a database that the travel managers have added to as they have completed RFPs over time.