Tom Gleason
After more than three decades and a number of roles at American Airlines, including executive vice president of Eastern division sales, Tom Gleason last year joined Sea Gate Travel Group as it was acquired by Hogg Robinson. Beginning to integrate legacy businesses and acquisitions formerly known as BTI Canada, Sea Gate and Robustelli World Travel, HRG North America in April named Gleason CEO. Today he spoke with Management.travelabout his take on global distribution system issues in the United States, and other matters.
HRG primarily uses Sabre. Have you decided to opt in to their Efficient Access Solution program?
In North America, we're all Sabre. Globally, we also use Amadeus and Galileo. Yes, we're opting in. You have to provide content for corporate accounts, and if you look at our corporate base, we handle some very high-end corporate accounts that need full content for us to take care of them the way we need to.
HRG is talking individually with clients about how they would share the cost of participating, as well as potential costs to book non-participating carriers (namely, AA). What are the factors that go into that?
You basically have two groups looking at it. The client or business manager looks at it by account, does the financials and sends that to the finance group. You have to be buttoned up to discuss it intelligently with each customer. We cannot sit down and talk to customers about anything that we don't feel comfortable we can back. We have a very sophisticated corporate base, so we need to be very well prepared to have each business manager, vice president of client management, president of client management or even sometimes myself get involved. You have to have your numbers tightened up, and that's taking in all bookings whether the [EAS participating carriers] or American.
Given your background at AA, what do you make of their situation with Sabre?
I love both AA and Sabre, but I do love my company most. Hopefully, they will come to a resolution soon that is good for both companies and also our industry. The companies go back to the early 1970s. AA built Sabre, and back then AA was Sabre's sales force. I do believe these are two very good companies that recognize they need to do business together and both have smart people, so I think they'll come to some sort of solution that is good for the industry. I don't think there will be a huge realignment, but we're investing in our super platform to access content in different ways so we're not totally dependent on a GDS and not totally dependent on carriers, providing total access to our customers. We're pretty much [developing] our own stuff.
Can you comment on HRG's progress in identifying additional acquisitions in the U.S.?
We've got three or four [candidates] as we speak, a couple further along than others. You look for the right type of company that brings a value of business and people, but that also will fit well into the culture of HRG.
What have you learned since moving over to the agency side?
I've learned how much I didn't know. I thought I had a pretty good grip, but I couldn't imagine coming from outside our industry and running a travel management company. Thirty-two years is a lot of airline experience, so I understood travel companies, the airlines and corporate accounts, but when you get to the TMC side, how you handle the accounts is [complicated]. First I had to get up to snuff as to technology offerings, because we and our clients are very technology-driven. The online booking tools, the financial offerings like [HRG's expense management tool] Spendvision. Also, we're not just travel, we're also expense management, charters and sports, consultative services ... so I had a lot to learn. It was kind of breathtaking, and thank God I had the airline experience and a great group of people who helped me along the way. They could have easily told me other things.