Sabre Tests The Group Booking Waters

<B> Sabre Tests The Group Booking Waters</B>

By Lauren Bielski

Exporting an increasingly popular booking concept to a growing community of Internet tradeshow registrants, the Sabre Group has announced that Travelocity--the company's $654 million Internet booking engine--will support group air and car reservations for trade shows produced by Needham, Mass.-based ZD Comdex and Forums.

Before the year is out, Sabre also will begin marketing its services to other tradeshow companies and associations. Sabre envisions a strong demand up front for the service, if the interest in Travelocity for individual bookings and Business Travel Solutions for corporate bookings are any indication.

In the short-run though, much of Sabre's marketing outreach will hinge on what happens with servicing the technology industry's mammoth Comdex show, which processes thousands of electronic registrations every year.

For Comdex, the Travelocity booking page will be set up to work as a customized "extension" of the Web page developed for the show's general registration.

After the registrant signs up for the conference itself--including housing and seminars and other show business, he or she then will hot-link to Travelocity to make air and car reservation directly in the Sabre computer reservation system.

The idea is to extend the "book-it-yourself" capabilities of the Net to the trade show attendee, by offering access to pre-negotiated meeting fares as well as any applicable lower cost options, said Jim Marsakona, vice president and general manager of Sabre Interactive.

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, agents at Travelocity's service center in San Antonio will be on hand to process orders and handle customer service questions.

"The April 20 Comdex Show will be our launch. We've been taking bookings since the end of February--and the initial response was strong," Marsakona said.

He explained that Sabre was prompted to launch a conference-oriented capability when Ziff Davis executives approached The Sabre Group's chief information officer, Terry Jones, and requested online support of their tech trade shows, including Comdex as well Networld+InterOp, Windows World and Seybold.

Peter Kastner, chief research officer and executive vice president of the Aberdeen Group consulting firm in Boston, said that Travelocity's initial hook-up with a technology trade show seemed a perfectly natural distribution channel to service as the booking services reaches maturity.

"Instead of trying to be all things to all people, Travelocity will focus on core markets that will yield the most payoff. It makes sense," he said. "The only problem I see with online booking tools that I've used is how time consuming they can be for the end user. Travel agents may be a more expensive booking source, but one phone call is typically quicker than a half-hour filling out the electronic form with all its various permutations and combinations of queries."

But Kastner also said that if the trade show sites run by Travelocity somehow address those obstacles, the tool will be very useful and undoubtedly popular.

Elsewhere in Sabre's tech empire, Business Travel Solutions, its corporate end-to-end booking and reporting system, soon will be able to support group booking capabilities as well, according to Denis Robinson, manager of traveler products for Sabre BTS.

"We're working on adding cloning capabilites to duplicate an itinerary in the case of several travelers on the exact same schedule for a summer release, as well as a capability that will support multiple origins to a single destination, which should be ready before the end of this year," Robinson said.

Marsakona pointed out that Business Travel Solutions developed the group booking capabilities now being used for Comdex, while Travelocity reshuffled its priorities in response to demand.

The Sabre Group, the largest CRS in the U.S. market, had been spun off from AMR Corp., parent company of American Airlines. Marsakona, a former American Airlines meetings and conventions manager, was excited by the promise of the burgeoning group market for corporations and associations.

"I think partnering with trade show companies and associations will be a significant standalone business for us that has the potential to be a huge revenue generator," Marsakona said.

"Likewise, BTS is exploring all the ways to work with corporate clients to enhance online booking services. We will be looking to expand our partnerships over the next year."

In the past two years, a newly untethered Sabre has sought to expand its client base beyond American Airlines and its technology tool-set beyond the mainframe environment. With Internet products like Travelocity (which employs a Unix-based Silicon Graphics server and an Oracle database) and EasySabre, as well as TurboSabre and PlanetSabre, the company is betting future revenue streams on the newer avenues of digital distribution.

Ziff viewed the booking technology as a natural complement to the online registration enjoyed by about 65 percent of the ZD Comdex and Forum's total tradeshow audience, Marsakona said.

But he predicted that even non-technology industries soon will be turning to the Internet to automate the registration of large meetings and conventions.