Sabre Signs Clients, Carlson

<B> Sabre Signs Clients, Carlson</B>
<I>BTS Upgrade On The Way</I>

By Cheryl Rosen

<I>Dallas</I> - It's been a busy couple of months for the Sabre Business Travel Solutions team, which this year already has inked two huge corporate contracts, begun an important distribution deal with Carlson Wagonlit Travel, released a new Lotus Notes-compatible version and all but finished an upgrade set to hit the market this month.

On the corporate front, BTS has added Price Waterhouse--the Big Six accounting firm whose pending merger with Coopers & Lybrand will bring its combined air volume to about $200 million a year--as well as Citicorp to its growing list of customers.

Citicorp, with an air volume of about $80 million (<I>BTN</I>, Aug. 11, 1997), will serve as the pilot site for BTS version 1.2, which it will roll out as part of an automated booking-through-expense-reporting solution that will integrate expense data from its Diners Club corporate card program.

The Carlson Wagonlit deal, too, marked an important alliance for BTS--adding the nation's second-largest business travel agency to its existing roster of mega agency distributors, which already included Rosenbluth International, BTI Americas and Maritz. Missing now is only the largest agency, American Express, which has co-developed its own automated booking system, AXI, in partnership with Microsoft.

Carlson in 1996 announced that TravelNet, then an independent software company, would provide the booking system for its ActOne suite of technology products (<I>BTN</I>, May 20, 1996). But in January 1997, TravelNet was acquired by Reed Travel Group, and the future of the system is in limbo as Reed undergoes an internal reorganization. A spokesperson for the Reed Travel Group--whose CEO, former Sabre Group CEO Kathy Misunas, is leaving the company--said it is "exploring its strategic options regarding TravelNet" and will announce its decision on the company's fate this week.

Misunas said that in the new Reed corporate structure, "there wasn't really a role for me from an information technology standpoint. If you look at the press release announcing the Reed reorganization, it pretty much said Reed is securing its print publications, but isn't quite sure what it wants to do with the rest of the product line. My interest was in transitioning the company from print to electronic commerce. I'm looking for a company to take into an electronic commerce or information technology future, and to set the vision and the pace for that."

TravelNet chairman John Shoolery and president Randy Malin referred all questions on the future of TravelNet to Reed. But Shoolery also said the addition of BTS to the Carlson arsenal reaffirms the importance of offering customers technology choices. "Customers are driving the choice of automation more than anyone thought, so agencies really do need to support a set of choices," he said.

Indeed, BTS managing director of sales and marketing Scott Smith noted the agreement with Carlson is non-exclusive on both sides, and that BTS will be offered to Carlson customers "as one customer choice, but not the only choice." But he added that BTS recently has been "encouraged" by the interest "from companies that seemed to be going down the TravelNet path" in the past.

"In terms of the boil under the lid of the kettle," Smith said, "we perceive that there is a huge amount of pent-up demand" for BTS among Carlson customers, and that "at least 10 huge customers" are interested in the product.

In all, Sabre BTS now has more than 100,000 traveler profiles in its system, Smith said, though he declined comment on the actual number of bookings coming through the system or their dollar volume.

Even after the Carlson alliance, BTS would like to add "a few more agencies in cities where we'd like to have a strong presence with superregional agencies." In California, for example, BTS is being distributed by Associated Travel of Santa Ana, the parent company of Aqua Software, which recently was acquired by U.S. Office Products. Smith acknowledged that "the next logical step would be a more comprehensive agreement with USOP," and that "those are discussions Sabre would like to have."

In the meantime, though, BTS is focusing its immediate attentions on the product itself, said director of marketing and business planning Peter Stevens. The new 1.2 version of the system, due out "in the next month or so," will add automatic searches for upgraded seats for frequent travelers, and seat maps from which travelers can choose for themselves between a window view or easy access to the john. By the end of the year, a Team Travel feature will focus on corporate meetings by facilitating the booking of tickets to a single destination from multiple departure cities.

Sabre also is "increasing its development cycle, so you will start to see very frequent releases," Stevens added. Version 1.3--which will focus on improvements aimed at winning over the ultimate customer, the traveler--will debut just 6 to 8 weeks from now.

Said Stevens, "1997 was about working out the details that can cause users to get dissatisfied. Now with Version 1.2 we have a stable platform with a lot of reliability. But the first booking is hard to make, though the next time is easier. Our next goal is to use wizard-like, simple booking paths to make that first booking easier."

At Carlson, meanwhile, market development vice president Debra Semans said the goal is to "accommodate best-in-class technology in each module of ActOne." Where Carlson now will "help customers figure out which system is best for them and evaluate the price differential, given their expected usage," between TravelNet and BTS on the booking side, it also partners with expense reporting software vendors Captura and Extensity, and the Cognos management reporting system. In Europe, Carlson Wagonlit has inked a contract with Kl&eacute;e Data Systems of Paris to provide the KDS booking system to European customers by the third quarter.

"We integrate all the systems through our database so everything looks and feels the same, and are working on different versions of existing products, with a big emphasis on getting everything Web-enabled in 1998," Semans said.

Existing BTS customers, meanwhile, are reporting positive results with the system just the way it is. At USAA, a large financial services company offering insurance, banking and mutual fund products, travel services director Laney Crumm estimated that she has moved 16-18 percent of her $6-7 million air volume off the phones and onto BTS.

Crumm rolled out the system in September 1997 to the 12,000 employees in USAA's San Antonio home office, and accompanied that with a satellite broadcast to remote offices to introduce the program. To build usage, she "ran some contests with the support of our preferred vendors, and created a BTS hot line, staffed with our people, who took calls from anyone who had a problem with the system," she said. "Knowing they were talking to USAA employees gave our users--who include more travel arrangers than travelers--a higher comfort level. And we brought in Cap Gemini, a Sabre integrator, to oversee the implementation."

As a company that owns its own travel agency, with its own ARC number, USAA "saw the need to bring in technology to lower our internal costs--and for an agency like ours, on site at headquarters, it's a very high cost."

Still, convincing the internal IS department of the value of the project was not easy, she said: "When I first brought this up, it was, 'Oh no, we can't give an outside company access to our data.' I spent a lot of time with data security people. When they said they couldn't do something, I'd ask what they could do, and then take that back to Sabre and say, 'This is what we need to do.' "

Lotus Blossoms

Sabre, meanwhile, also has high hopes for the new Lotus Notes version, which debuted this month. "We're excited about the Lotus platform because they already have 20 million desktops out there. We realize that we need to follow our corporate customers--where they go, that's where we want to go," Stevens said.

In addition to that huge client base, Lotus Notes also offers unique features upon which BTS can build. In Notes, for example, users can save an itinerary even when they are disconnected from the server. And Sabre also is focusing on ways to put the Notes calendar function to good use, Stevens said.

By that does he mean allowing travelers to enter a meeting on their calendars and have the system automatically pick up the entry, go into BTS and book the trip for them?

"That's definitely a feature and a function corporations want, and we are developing those features as we speak," said Stevens. "I think we'll see that in 1998."

At Lotus Consulting, director of client services Joe Shaulis said that IBM, which counted 20 million Lotus users as of Jan. 1, expects that number to leap by 50 percent to 30 million users before 1998 is out. Lotus, too, does not see its relationship with Sabre as exclusive, and is "talking to other systems, agencies and the CRSs." Shaulis said. Lotus expects to be signing another travel industry partnership "no later than the second quarter."

Using Lotus Notes, or its next-generation Internet version, Domino, "gives you the best of two worlds," Shaulis said. "The Domino version allows you to access the system using a browser, as well as having it ride on existing clients and tap into the other functions of Notes--its workflow functionality, and its integration with human resources and financial systems."

At Asea Brown Boveri Inc. in Windsor, Conn., business travel technology manager Don LePard--a longtime Lotus Notes advocate--suggested that the Notes calendar feature might hold even more interesting possibilities for corporate buyers down the line.

A Notes-based travel system, he said, could pull together a list of global meeting attendees from their calendar listings and suggest that some avoid traveling altogether and just "attend" the proceedings at corporate video conferencing sites in their home cities. In addition, the system automatically could stagger attendees to limit the number of ABB employees on any given flight, confirm that all are traveling in accordance with corporate policy, book all seats on e-tickets and generate e-ticket itineraries and receipts in individual travelers' Notes mailboxes.

So is he interested in the Notes version of BTS? "No, because we are an Apollo house, and most of our business is not on American Airlines," he said.

And what if Sabre, now an independent entity from American Airlines, allowed corporate customers to use a BTS Notes version on the front end, and still connect to Apollo as their CRS?

"Now that would be very interesting," LePard said.