Sabre’s version of Facebook is coming to an Amex Corporate Travel booking engine near you. But no one can tell you exactly why they’re spending money on this, other than the promise of cost savings like
once employees know they are traveling to the same location, they can arrange to share ground transportation, for example.
Technology investments predicated on reducing taxicab expense seem like a great idea to me.Not to worry, the business rationale promises to be
“more of a play that might compete with applications that do social networking for the entire enterprise, such as ones delivered by CoreSpeed and IBM, to benefit beyond the travel program and into a space where Sabre is competing with these generalists,”
Or something like that.Oh, it’s also about inverting the corporate travel dialogue, so that travel managers aren’t communicating out but developing better solutions for travelers in emerging markets. (They should, like, listen to their internal customers and stuff. Which they could probably do without a Sabre-powered social networking tool, they could read Flyertalk maybe.)
You would think they would have other things to improve. Curious to see how it materializes. My company uses Amex (I don’t – I book directly), so this may drive me to the site.