Sabre to overhaul hotel rate negotiation process

Published: 17 Jul 2008

Sabre Travel Network has come up with a new rate negotiation and auditing service for corporations, their travel management companies and hoteliers.

In announcing the new service, Sabre also announced the acquisition of BidStork, which offers a web-based application that creates, delivers and manages hotel requests for proposals (RFPs).

Through the new comprehensive rate negotiation service, according to Sabre, it 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.

"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."

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 programme – that until now was not possible since no viable solutions existed in the marketplace," said Greg Webb, chief marketing officer for Sabre.

Webb added, "BidStork 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."

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