Sabre Seeking To Add Value
"I can't understand or support models that drive more commoditization, we've had enough of that," Sabre CEO and president Sam Gilliland told attendees this morning at The Masters Program, the 13th annual meeting of top business travel services suppliers and buyers held in Washington, D.C., today and yesterday.
"Further commoditization leaves less service to corporations and their employees," he said. Meta-search engines, he said, such as AOL's, Kayak, and Yahoo's FareChase, reduce all the attributes of travel to one: price. "We should be moving in the opposite direction toward adding value."
Gilliland said more of the focus should be on seeking to understand the customer and working with suppliers to come up with further options and more productive tools, while there remains the need to continue a relentless focus on cost.
He said Sabre had cut $350 million in costs in the past four years and had shrunk its work force from 11,000 to 6,500 employees. Since fall 2002, he said, Sabre has given $200 million back to airlines.
Gilliland noted that it took a long time for competitors to follow Sabre's action to provide a return to airlines. "We led. It was painful, but it was the right thing to do," he said.
Asked whether his intention, as the three-year deals he had struck with the airlines begin to expire, is to replace them with another interim, rather than a long-term, solution, Gilliland said, "We want a long-term solution although there may be things we need to do in the short term, but we need to be disciplined about how we approach this."
Before deregulation, Gilliland said, all prices were the same.
"Now we have an opportunity to move the industry forward," he said. "We need to spend more time in groups with corporations to discuss what we can do there."
Asked whether Sabre will acquire a travel management company, he said, "As we have watched others look to acquire travel management companies, we have decided to watch. We have no intentions today to acquire a travel management firm."