Martin Cowley
The travails of accessing rates and inventory in Europe continue: Lufthansa and Amadeushave yet to come to terms exempting Amadeus users from footing a greater share of the airline's global distribution system bills, and easyJet cemented a plan to charge a fee for GDS bookings--albeit at a lower rate than originally planned. The Guild of Travel Management Companies this month said it convinced easyJet in September to reduce its per segment, point-of-sale fee to €3 from €4 (after a prior reduction to €4 from €5), as well as to cut its fees for expedited boarding and baggage checks. Amadeus, meanwhile, extended to 31 January in Germany and Austria and 31 March in Switzerland its coverage of booking surcharges planned for Lufthansa and Swiss. Sabre Travel Network and Travelport this year established with those airlines agreements that exclude the charges. During an October interview at an Association of Corporate Travel Executives conference here, Martin Cowley, Sabre Travel Network senior vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, took questions about the Lufthansa program, content challenges in lodging and rail, and Sabre's approach to clients in the region. An excerpt of the discussion follows.
Is Lufthansa paying less per segment than it was before?
No. We didn't talk economics at all. We talked about expanding our existing agreement and including their "Preferred Fares" program.
There are alternatives to booking through the GDS for hoteliers in Europe. What can be done to better aggregate independent hotels?
We're starting from quite a long way back. It is one of those debates that kind of takes on a meaningful dimension as things get a bit tougher. If you're in a relatively unconstrained capacity world at a time when the market is booming, you can play the multi-channel game when you're a supplier. But when the pressure's on, you have to be a little bit more frank with yourself about where is your best stuff coming from. We have a team out there going into non-mainstream properties. We see that as an essential part of our offering in Europe.
How do you respond to those who believe Amadeus has the best rail offering?
We have the best universal application for rail in our rail consolidator platform. We are the first GDS in France to work with the SNCF Web Services distribution solution. We're the best-placed GDS to work with Railteam in the future through that. I would need to understand how to quantify that observation you're making, but we have some fantastic opportunities in rail that we're working on now and have delivered. As travel in Europe goes more intermodal, people are going to be opening up in more places to do business ... towns not close to an airport or where there are more call centers and more factories. We understand the power of high-speed railand how that will change the whole landscape. You're just not going to be flying to a bunch of places in five years that you're flying to today. What's changed is the fact that we're aware and are working on these opportunities in rail. Not that we weren't aware before, but there were a lot of other things we were working on. We want to be the No. 1 GDS provider of rail in Europe.
In general, are there notable large European markets where you feel like you want a bigger presence?
I'm more interested in getting Sabre to think about business segment opportunities rather than geographic opportunities. If you talk to a corporate travel manager from France, Germany, the United Kingdom ... apart from the language, you'll find they have really similar needs. Our opportunity is to address those needs across geographies. So we don't do this in Italy and that in Germany--we look at taking what we do well with global and corporate, or online, and try to make that work well in Europe.
Inasmuch as you might count corporate relationships in Europe, are they mostly U.S.-based multinationals?
Substantially, they are U.S. based. We do work with Adidas very effectively in Germany. A great opportunity for us is to work with more European corporations.