<B>Sabre Unveils MIDT Lite</B>
By Jay Campbell
Sabre last week announced a new marketing information data tape product designed to help small airlines identify top markets, plan routes and keep tabs on their market share of Sabre bookings by origin and destination. The LiteVision product will be available by the end of this month after beta testing.
The data, referred to as MIDT, is extremely powerful in terms of helping carriers understand how they are doing in specific markets and how to compensate travel agencies for their business (BTN, March 22, 1999). The airlines also often use MIDT to monitor business with corporate clients.
While the major carriers have bought the information from Sabre and its GDS competitors for years, smaller airlines have not been able to afford the expensive intelligence--and have complained that it is a competitive barrier.
LiteVision, a descendent of WiseVision and ProVision for big carriers, is cheaper and focuses on a smaller group of markets. "Now, because of Internet technology, smaller airlines have the ability to access HTML-based reports," said Sabre's Scot Anderson, director of application marketing.
Sabre is targeting carriers with fewer than 10 million passengers per year. Anderson said LiteVision is in test with Frontier, Legend, Midway, Midwest Express and National Airlines, though a Frontier executive said, "We're not familiar with it; Sabre wants to schedule a meeting so we can view it."
Midwest Express told BTN last year that it was working with Sabre on customized MIDT (BTN, Oct. 4, 1999).
Booking data on a select group of markets is updated monthly. License fees are "significantly less" than what the majors pay, said Anderson, proportional to the smaller amounts of data.
Sabre called LiteVision an industry first, but Galileo and Worldspan both said they offer something similar.
"We came out with an Internet-based product about a year ago," said Galileo senior vice president of vendor marketing Michael Foliot. "It's called MIDT Impact, and it allows a carrier to make ad hoc queries against our global MIDT product. The difference is that in Sabre's, the carrier needs to tell them the regional subset. We do per-record queries and charge for each."
Galileo clients include American Trans Air and Transbrasil.
Sabre provides four basic reports: total bookings and market share for all the carriers in each of the top markets over a specific time period; a specific airline's top markets; top travel agencies for each top market over a specific time period, the total agency bookings, agency share, specified airline agency bookings and airline agency share; and passenger booking patterns for top travel agencies in each top market, focusing on agency performance by region.
"When we say regional, we allow the customer to define four or five regions and give them overall system data," Anderson said. "Frontier maybe wants the Colorado region or they may group a couple of states."
The product has an international component for which, Anderson said, "a few carriers" have expressed interest.
In ProVision, big airlines get data that already is processed into O&D form for the purposes of data mining and analysis. WiseVision is the raw data that airlines process themselves. LiteVision is only reports, not raw data.
For larger airlines, Anderson said Sabre is "working on tools with similar Internet access to subscriber data.