PhoCusWright@ITB08: Dinosaurs2.0

Tom Klein is group president of Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Airline Solutions – giving him control of the GDS and its small but growing business supplying various systems to various airlines.

But how long will B2B be a separate silo? Klein said at one point that ‘GDSs need to get into Web2.0’. He said that one hotel was currently running a campaign on MySpace using Sabre’s B2B hotel marketing brand SynXis.

Similarly, the airline solutions team is working on tools to help airlines drive even more ancillary revenues on their brand dotcom by tapping into the fact that 'one traveller can have seven different buying behaviours'.

There is a service crisis in the US airline sector. [Only the US?] He said that Sabre needs ‘a different type of access’ from the airlines in order to help the airlines sort out service issues.

It has recently launched cubeless, a social network for corporate travellers which will integrated into GetThere and which American Express, the world’s largest business travel company – will use.

The morphing of B2B solutions into consumer tools is already happening, and vice versa. There will be more to come – Sabre isn’t the only travel technology company thinking along these lines.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution