Sabre Travel Network and Polycom plan to launch next year a
reservations platform for remote conferencing facilities that can be integrated
into both corporate online booking tools and travel agent desktops.
Sabre Travel Network president Greg Webb said the Sabre
Virtual Meetings booking hub will encompass both private conference rooms
loaded by individual corporations and public rooms in hotels or at office
accommodation supplier Regus locations. Reserving a virtual meeting, he said,
can become a seamless part of the travel arranging and booking process.
"The biggest hindrance is that these services are not
in the current workflow," Webb explained. "This will enable corporations
to make better buying decisions, allow travel agencies to become collaboration
consultants and help employees at companies make good decisions as to when to
travel."
While booking tools including Sabre's GetThere already allow
clients to integrate remote conferencing policies into the booking process—messages
recommending a virtual conference as an alternative to travel for internal
meetings, for example—the platform will allow travelers to compare costs, check
conference room availability and complete bookings within the same tool,
according to Webb. Currently, travelers determine costs through the booking
tool or agent and then separately call around to check pricing and availability
of remote conferencing rooms to make that comparison, he said.
"The process has become cumbersome and has impeded the
ability for people to make good decisions," Webb said, later elevating his
description of the scheduling experience to "horrific."
Sabre and Polycom already developed the inventory component
of the platform and have been testing it with a handful of travel management
companies and corporations. The partners plan to launch the full system in the
first half of 2012, including inventory from previously announced participant Cisco. The third major telepresence provider, HP, also is expected to
participate, Webb said. "Next we'll be working with the public room
providers to include their inventory, and two have agreed already," he
added.
In addition to its integration within GetThere and Sabre's
agent desktops, Sabre Virtual Meetings will be compatible with other corporate
booking tools and reservations systems, Webb said. It also will be available as
a standalone website.
Polycom executive vice president Sue Hayden said part of her
company's focus is interconnectivity, ensuring that various remote conferencing
systems can communicate with one another—regardless of provider—and that
travelers can use a webcam in a hotel room or a tablet in an airport. The
company is a member of the Open Visual Communications Consortium, a new
coalition of global service providers working to develop such a network, she
said.
"We want it to be just as easy as calling from one
mobile carrier to another," Hayden said, adding how such calls were
"not always as seamless as it is now."
She said the number of remote conferencing endpoints
globally is expected to triple by the end of 2015, leading to "a
tremendous amount of adoption."
Sabre's Webb said he does not expect such adoption to
curtail business travel. "Companies that have had the opportunity to use
this for internal meetings have turned those dollars to revenue-generating
travel and customer-facing meetings," he said. "As this rolls out and
becomes more effective, we'll see an increase in business travel and greater ROI
based on each travel dollar spent."
This report originally was published in The Beat.