Sabre to Overhaul Hotel Rate Negotiation Process with New Simplified, Web-Based Solution for Corporate Travel

Business Wire, July 15, 2008

Acquisition of BidStork Provides First Step for Complete Negotiation Service for Hoteliers and Corporate Travel Buyers

SOUTHLAKE, Texas -- Under the heading, "By the numbers," the third bullet should read: Represented nearly 10,000 destinations in RFP responses with over 800 average (user) estimated room nights per destination (sted 10,0000 destinations).

The corrected release reads:

SABRE TO OVERHAUL HOTEL RATE NEGOTIATION PROCESS WITH NEW SIMPLIFIED, WEB-BASED SOLUTION FOR CORPORATE TRAVEL

Acquisition of BidStork Provides First Step for Complete Negotiation Service for Hoteliers and Corporate Travel Buyers

Sabre Travel Network has announced a new streamlined, easy-to-use and much more effective rate negotiation and auditing service for corporations, their travel management companies and hoteliers.

The new solution addresses what has been a huge problem cited by hoteliers, corporations and their travel management companies for some time: every fall, corporations and hoteliers start their annual "dance of the new negotiated rates" for the following year. The "dance," however, has been less than elegant.

In announcing the new service, Sabre also announced the acquisition of BidStork, which has quickly become recognized by corporations as a far more elegant solution than anything that exists in the marketplace for their rate negotiation process with hoteliers.

At its core, BidStork, which was launched in 2006, is a web-based application that creates, delivers and manages hotel requests for proposals (RFPs). It allows travel professionals to quickly and easily assemble an NBTA-compliant RFP package through an online RFP wizard. Additionally, corporate travel buyers can source and map hotels in proximity to relevant travel destinations, deliver the RFP package, interactively negotiate rates and create final contracts -- culminating in a best-in-class online hotel directory that clients rave about.

"BidStork is simply the best RFP tool out there, hands down," said Dona Kalebic, hotel RFP specialist at Adelman Travel.

Through the new comprehensive rate negotiation service, Sabre is addressing the typical, time-consuming, manual and often "clunky" process of the annual negotiated rate process between corporate travel management and hoteliers. To date, this has involved soliciting, bidding and negotiating rates, then loading the thousands of rates - or hundreds of thousands or rates in the case of some very large corporate customers that have started using BidStork - after completing the negotiated rates process each year. And then there is the "after-dance" once all rates are loaded and effective and the rate auditing process kicks in - and for negotiated rates, current solutions have been very manual, time-consuming and limited in functionality.

The result of this inefficient process: many, many cases of either negotiated rates showing up incorrectly or not showing up at all during the shopping and booking of travel. Sabre estimates that there are four million annual "passive" bookings associated with travel agents not being able to find the negotiated rates. For corporations, this can lead to inconsistent and higher travel spend, and lost revenue opportunities for hoteliers and travel agencies.

"Our mission at BidStork has always been to provide leading-edge RFP software at incredibly low prices, then leverage that into thousands of buy side (hotel side) subscribers," said Joseph Friedman, founder and president of BidStork. "Our initial version of the software rapidly penetrated the market by allowing travel managers, travel agencies and procurement departments to easily find, negotiate and contract with hotels and hotel chains worldwide. The affiliation with Sabre is really exciting and will allow us to make the process a truly synchronized dance for corporate travel and the hospitality industry worldwide."

Sabre is the first global distribution system to offer a hotel RFP tool, and the negotiated rate auditing option, planned to be added later this year for both corporate customers and hoteliers, will provide a vast improvement to current marketplace solutions. GetThere customers will get the additional efficiency and cost savings of automated population of hotel profiles.

"The result of bringing these capabilities together is that Sabre corporate agencies and corporate customers will now have a fully integrated RFP management process via an easy-to-use online tool - a critical piece of a travel procurement program - that until now was not possible since no viable solutions existed in the marketplace," said Greg Webb, chief marketing officer for Sabre.

"BidStork is really a story of the little company that could. With only seven people, including contracted employees, this small company is helping change the way corporations and the hospitality marketplace interact," Webb said. "They took what had been seen by many as an impossibly complicated process and applied their magic for a simplified solution. Big corporations and hoteliers are clamoring to get a place in line to be next on the list to get this capability, especially when we talk to them about how this capability is forming the core to a completely new way to handle and streamline the hotel rate discussions and process."