Articles tagged “sabre”

Some of the weaker online travel agencies in Europe and Asia are getting squeezed out. Sabre sold LastMinute.com to Bravofly Rumbo Group for next to nothing, and TUI Group gave up on AsiaRooms.com in the face of stiff competition.

The global distribution world has long offered vacation rentals to travel agents but the investments by Amadeus Ventures and former Sabre CFO Jeff Jackson in BookingPal symbolize new and more serious interest.

The Roaming Gnome himself whispers to us that he is very happy about the Expedia acquisition of Travelocity. It was touch and go under Sabre ownership for such a long time as Sabre, with priorities elsewhere, totally bungled ownership of Travelocity and Lastminute.com.

Expedia is expected to retain the Travelocity brand. It would be foolish not to because the whole value proposition is to tap into the allegiances of Travelocity loyalists. And that leaves Orbitz out in the cold. It is unable to achieve scale and Expedia and the Priceline Group are apparently not interested in scooping Orbitz up.

Barring complications, it looks like Travelocity will become the newest Expedia Inc. brand fairly soon.

Sabre acquired the once-proud brand, Lastminute.com, for nearly $1.2 billion in 2005 -- and now is selling it for about one-tenth of the initial acquisition cost. Sabre bungled the Lastminute.com acquisition and integration and now it is finally unloading the company after years of trying so Sabre can get rid of a profit drain and focus on its core businesses.

Concur officials are saying all the right things about the future of the company under SAP ownership. Sometimes acquisitions don't turn out exactly as one or both of the parties intended, so we'll just have to wait and see how it all turns out.

Sabre's Klein is correct that IATA won't be driving the implementation of the next wave of ancillary and personalized services from airlines. But the track record shows that Sabre won't likely be doing so, either.

In this transaction, Pegasus Solutions unloads a struggling reservations business to a private equity firm, and a smaller Pegasus Solutions, still facing lots of issues, lives to fight another day.

B2B travel companies are taking advantage of social media's inherent function of connecting with real people.