Sabre Diving Into E-Mtgs.

<B>Sabre Diving Into E-Mtgs.</B>
<I>GetThere Buy Raises Weighty Partnerships</I>

By Chris Davis

The burgeoning alliances between online meeting management firms and booking providers was shaken up last month, with the Sabre Holdings Group's proposed $757 million purchase of GetThere Inc., as both players have recent, but deep, ties to the online meeting industry.

GetThere purchased meeting portal AllMeetings.com in July, three months after Sabre formed a partnership with AllMeetings competitor EventSource.com that positioned Sabre as the portal's exclusive global distribution system. With Sabre the pending owner of AllMeetings, there are implications for EventSource.

"A lot of these details won't be known until after the deal closes and we can sit down and have substantial discussions with GetThere and AllMeetings," said Sabre vice president of marketing and product development Pete Stevens. "But we have established partnerships because we all think the corporate use of group tools has a great upside, and nobody has solved all the problems yet."

Stevens said Sabre has no intention of restricting its possibilities in partnering with meeting and group management outfits. "We will look at all the players and give corporations a choice," he said. "They will choose tools they like, and that will include shades of all different players."

But changes to the deal positioning Sabre as EventSource's exclusive booking engine are unlikely, Stevens said: "We anticipate no change in those agreements." Officials from EventSource, AllMeetings and GetThere declined comment.

"This will have a dramatic effect on the landscape of online meeting management, and if I were EventSource or their customers, I would have some concerns," said Rob Wald, director of product marketing at online booking vendor E-Travel, a competitor of GetThere and a subsidiary of Oracle Corp. "Sabre has said they're looking for an integrated, GDS-independent, direct-link product, which sounds more like GetThere than BTS. EventSource is locked up to Sabre and that product might have a limited future."

E-Travel has an alliance with meeting portal StarCite, but the relationship is not exclusive. E-Travel and StarCite executives have argued that exclusive contracts between online booking engines and meeting portals is unwise due to the limitation of choice they offer. "One year from now it's a very good bet that the online meeting management industry will be dramatically different and that does not help EventSource," Wald said. "They cannot strike a development with another player."

Other industry analysts agreed that changes would be forthcoming. "That may be true," said Jeff Rasco, senior consultant for strategic relations with Austin, Texas-based Team Tech International. "But there have been deals left and right, and the Internet culture creates deals with people that you would never think of, like your competitors. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see the meeting engines link to multiple booking sources and vice versa.

"GetThere has corporate travel locked up well, and one complaint meeting planners have is that their corporate rates don't show up on many online air vendors," Rasco added. "So this is quite a link to have wrapped up in-house, and it puts them in a commanding position in the meetings market."

Jim Spellos of online planner education site Meeting U. said the Sabre link is likely to enhance AllMeetings' key feature, a tool that selects cost-efficient properties based on attendees' departure airports. "Since it has already worked the air angle into the site-selection process, this perhaps will give them the opportunity to flesh it out further or be even more accurate with rates directly from the Sabre GDS," Spellos said. "It's logical to think any RFP engine, in trying to create a more holistic product, would line up with the airlines and GDSs to provide a one-stop shop.

"We hear about all the mergers and the alliances and you wonder about the effect," Spellos added. "But planners seem to like different aspects of each site the best, which cuts across the grain of what these companies are trying to provide. They seem to have no problem going to different companies for anything related to meetings and events.