The figures are massive: 7.5 billion dollars for cruise, 185 billion euros for rail, 500 billion dollars for lodging. Using these global figures as a foundation, Sabre Travel Network's Traci Mercer shared her view into a growing part of the business: lodging, ground and sea.
Trends impacting the business
As far as some of the wider trends that are making waves on the lodging, ground, and sea businesses, Mercer sees the following:
- Bleisure. While not only a millennial thing, this trend most widely impacts this part of the business as bleisure means more non-air spend. Business travelers might switch hotels, and are also spending more money when they stay longer in the destination.
- Duty-of-care. These extended trips have implications for risk management. The vast majority of business travelers (80%) believe that their companies are responsible for keeping them safe. This has implications for how lodging, ground, and sea are managed in a corporate travel setting.
- Mobile bookings. Mobile continues to show gains in bookings. Travelers are showing more inclinations to book on-the-go, which is especially pertinent for suppliers looking to capture last-minute bleisure spend, as well as more in-destination spend in general.
Lodging Content Services
Given its size, lodging is a vital piece of the business. As such, Mercer explained developments in how lodging content will be surfaced to agencies using Sabre for bookings.
- Flexible APIs. Rigid APIs make it much more difficult for customers to get to what they want.This is more important than ever in age where agencies are building customized solutions.
- Comparison shopping. In the consumer world, it's very common to be able to search by calendar or to be able to easily compare different options. As travel agents no, this is not really the case when it comes to booking via GDS. Is enterprise software becomes more like consumer software, travel agents can expect more functionality to help them quickly compare and book.
- Revenue driving capabilities. As ancillary spend grows, and airlines begin to implement NDC, there are going to be new opportunities for travel agents to increase commissions and booking size. The ability to make more money is going to be essential for the adoption of new features in any GDS interface.
- More content choices. Limited content can often be frustratingWhen clients are able to see more options then travel agents. Sabre Travel Network promises to expand these options to ensure that its agent partners are best positioned to compete in the world of consumerized enterprise technology.
The full keynote is below. As with any presentations at the corporate partner event, the perspectives and promises are 100% those of the company. With the roadmap laid out,Now we can all judge and map accordingly.
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