After all, to the epic entertainment company Walt Disney, revenue management is more than numbers, it’s a science.

During this week’s SabreSonic Customer Sales & Service (CSS) conference in Toronto, Canada, Disney’s Mark Shafer, senior vice president, revenue and profit management, told airline executives they apply their revenue science across all their many brands – they just have to identify constraints specific to each one.

 Disney’s science of revenue management analytics transcends multiple lines of business and geography.

“We define revenue management as a quantitative way to solve business problems,” Shafer told nearly 80 airline executives from 25 airlines around the world assembled to learn new and different ways to increase revenues.  “It’s about making better business decisions – how to improve your odds of making a good decision.”

Incorporating analytics into the revenue management mix provides huge returns, he said.

“If you don’t pursue analytics today, it’s an opportunity forgone for the future.”

And to illustrate his point, Shafer likened the benefit of using analytics to Jeffrey Ma, the Vegas card counter on which the movie “21” is based. The most basic thing you can do is make business decisions based on experience and gut reaction. But that’s “playing naively.”

Instead you can “count cards” or employ analytics to improve your odds at making better business decisions.

But Disney doesn’t stop there. They employ a Customer Centric Revenue Management model. They define this as using data to better understand your customers, which will ultimately increase conversion and grow profitability. The very thing airlines are trying to accomplish today.

“Growing trust among your customers is a race that has no finish line,” Shafer said. “You need a balance between transparency and relevancy.”

United’s published fares and inventory, as well as its material ancillary products and services that are distributed through Sabre, will be available to travel buyers worldwide who use the Sabre travel marketplace.  Sabre and United currently are working to make United’s premium seat option, Economy Plus, available once again through Sabre.

United joins other global airlines that sell or expect to sell their ancillary products and services in the Sabre travel marketplace. 

Sabre and United will co-develop solutions using next-generation technology that will permit United to offer more relevant personalized offers to their loyal customers.  These advancements will also better promote and disclose the unique value of the airline’s different fare and ancillary products and services to travel agents with additional descriptive text and graphics for enhanced on-screen merchandising within the Sabre Red Workspace and through Sabre Web Services.

“Sabre will merchandise United’s complete range of fare offerings, including material ancillaries, into our marketplace in a way that will help differentiate them,” said David Gross, senior vice president, Sabre Global Supplier Distribution. “Sabre is committed to helping United more effectively market and sell its products and services to the broadest number of travelers.”

Doug Leo, United’s senior vice president of Strategy and Business Development said: “We look forward to this next chapter in distribution, where United and Sabre are better able to promote the airline’s growing portfolio of products and services through our travel agency partners where many of our highest value customers shop. Our new agreement with Sabre will support more personalization for travelers who wish to receive tailored offers, give travelers and agencies a richer experience, promote revenue growth, and improve United’s ability to connect with our customers.”

Sabre and United will co-develop solutions using next-generation technology that will permit United to offer more relevant personalized offers to their loyal customers.  These advancements will also better promote and disclose the unique value of the airline’s different fare and ancillary products and services to travel agents with additional descriptive text and graphics for enhanced on-screen merchandising within the Sabre Red Workspace and through Sabre Web Services.

Read more about this agreement at http://www.sabre.com/newsroom/category/media-releases/

All Sabre employees worldwide who participated in Give Time Together over the past several weeks and those doing more in the weeks to come are all true heroes. Sabre employees made a tremendous positive impact on global communities.  Check out Give Time Together activities from our teams arouond the world: https://www.facebook.com/SabreHoldingsCR

 London, UK – May 15, 2013 – Sabre, a global technology company, has started selling pre-paid baggage for Air France- KLM.

The airline has chosen to sell this ancillary product through Sabre using industry technology standards developed by ATPCo and IATA.

The electronic miscellaneous document (EMD) standard allows an agent to efficiently purchase an airline’s ancillary products on behalf of travellers in the same way they would a base airfare. This helps airlines generate revenue by making their ancillary products broadly available and easy to buy in all channels.

Jean Wieviorka, Air France-KLM senior vice president, corporate and distribution, said: “Revenue generated from the sale of ancillary services enables us to serve our customers wide-ranging preferences, and pushes us towards the economic objectives laid out in the Transform initiatives within the AFKL Group.

“Embracing GDS technology to maximize this revenue stream will ensure our business continues to grow. Distribution through travel agencies and Sabre’s global reach ensures we will continue to provide full content to intermediaries, allowing Air France-KLM to deepen its footprint in markets around the world.”

David Gross, senior vice president said the sale of ancillaries, such as pre-paid baggage, is an increasingly valuable revenue stream for airlines.

 “Sabre has been investing in technology to support airlines’ merchandising strategies for many years. The global distribution system provides an important platform for airlines to market and sell their products, and for agents to capture buying data for their corporate customers,” he said.                                                                            

“The sale of ancillaries through this marketplace generates important cost savings for both agencies and airlines. By using one platform to sell multiple products an airline can significantly reduce its IT costs. Additionally, front-line travel consultants can improve their efficiency and customer service levels by being able to book and fulfill base fares and ancillaries together.”

 Gross said Air France-KLM’s decision to merchandise its ancillaries in Sabre shows the airline’s long-term commitment to an open marketplace for air travel, which benefits airlines, agencies, travel managers and travellers, ensuring travel shopping remains competitive, transparent and easy.

Air France-KLM joins a long list of airlines, including Finnair, Alitalia, Brussels Airlines, Qantas, Westjet and US Airways, that have chosen to offer ancillary services and bundled fares through Sabre’s travel marketplace and travel agencies.

This year we took a different approach to planning volunteer events in North Texas, home of our company’s headquarters and our single largest employee population.  We first canvassed our local charities to learn their needs for volunteers and then we organized our events around those needs. This is our way of putting the community first and making sure the efforts of our volunteers are making a meaningful difference. We invited the charities to our Southlake campus for our first-ever Community Partner Fair in March. Our people had the opportunity to learn more about the mission of these organizations and meet some of the faces behind them before they signed up for events.  Many made real and emotional connections with some new causes.

Another reason I think we’re doing even better this year is thanks in part to one of our young, entrepreneurial leaders in the company who applied the core of what Sabre does as a business – managing big data – with what has become core to our culture – volunteering – to make this year our most successful ever in terms of employee participation. And that has to mean we’re making a greater contribution to our neighborhoods and to the world, right?

John Hanson is a vice president in our Technology organization, and he is leading Give Time Together for us this year, on top of his day job leading a shared systems team. John was inspired to create a dashboard for our leaders – much like the ones Sabre creates for our customers to help their leaders harness their data and easily glean meaning from it so they can make better, more informed and data-driven decisions to better run their businesses.

Sabre leaders can see how well they are doing to motivate and encourage their teams to sign up for volunteer activities in their various locales around the world. Because we have real-time data that tells us where we have people signed up for events and where we don’t – by leader, line of business or geography – we’ve been able to have more informed discussions that have led to record-setting participation by our people this year. It doesn’t hurt that by nature we are a pretty competitive bunch!

We’re building a Habitat for Humanity house in Fort Worth, making desks for children with special needs in Montevideo, fixing a computer lab for visually impaired students in Bangalore, teaching children in Krakow how to be safe on the Internet… and so much more! And I couldn’t be more proud of our teams around the world!

Today kicks off the week of giving back and it starts at the top. More than 100 Sabre executives in our Southlake, Texas, headquarters, participated in a “Pack-A-Thon,” packing bags of nutritious meals for at-risk and malnourished children around the world. The event was hosted by Feed the Hunger, the children’s outreach of New Directions International, an organization that has been working with kids worldwide since 1968.

“I was so impressed with the energy and enthusiasm of our Sabre employees today.  They clearly connected with how these meals will provide nutrition to kids in Haiti and did a phenomenal job with their meal packing.  They blew the speed targets out of the water!” said John Hanson, Sabre vice president corporate systems, who also serves as this year’s Give Time Together Chairperson.

Sabre employees will volunteer in hundreds of events around the world this week, including building a home for a family in Ft. Worth, Texas, through Habitat for Humanity, giving technology lessons at high schools in Krakow, Poland, serving food at Willing Hearts Soup Kitchen in Singapore, helping out at The Ronald McDonald House in Japan, battling hunger at the Food Bank of the Rockies in Denver, Colo., donating blood in Latin America and spending time at the SOS Children’s Village in Bangalore, India.

“I feel extremely lucky to be a part of company that presents these types of giving opportunities to its employees. We truly are changing lives and it’s very gratifying to be a part of that. It’s just another day that I think folks feel truly proud to be a part of Sabre,” said Hanson.

Check out more here: http://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Travel-Technology/Sabre-product-uses-loyalty-info/?a=issues

In offices and factories around the world it’s not unusual nowadays to find four generations of employees working side-by-side. Outstanding communications must be, therefore, a fundamental characteristic of any successful modern business. Last month, Amy Lynch (Baby Boomer) and Kim Lear (Millennial), of generational research firm BridgeWorks, addressed the GetThere Summit in London. Martin Ferguson reports…

At six years old I considered the loss of a tooth to be cause for great celebration. First of all, it was a sign that I was becoming a big boy. But secondly, and most importantly, it meant the paltry sum my parents called “pocket money” was given a much needed boost by the Tooth Fairy. Questioning whether a pint-sized pixie actually came into my bedroom during the night, lifted my pillow as I slept, and swapped one of my molars for moolah never entered my head. It was fast, easy money, and I was happy to play along.

The modern six-year-old is not quite as willing to be duped, in spite of the financial incentive. BridgeWorks’ Kim Lear, a 26-year-old researcher on the topic of generations, tells the story of a young boy in the U.S. who became suspicious of his parents’ elaborate yarns about the supernatural philanthropist. The disenchanted child informed them he was aware the Tooth Fairy was fictional and demanded the demeaning charades stop immediately.

“How does he know?” the disappointed mother asked the boy’s older sister. “Well mom, he Googled it,” was the reply

Though the young inquisitor will eventually realize he’d have been better off keeping his trap shut and pocketing the dough, the tale does demonstrate a crucial point about the younger generations.

“They demand honesty. They demand transparency. And they question everything,” said Lear. And unprecedented access to information is also the most potent weapon in their generational arsenal.

At this point, it’s worth recapping who the different generations are and what makes them distinct. If total travel policy compliance and adoption are the key goals for travel managers, they need to understand how to better control those whose instinct is to query every instruction.

The Traditionalists were born before 1946. They experienced the Great Depression; unemployment, hunger, and desperation were part of life. The harrowing experience of the Second World War meant many became patriotic and fiscally conservative. They also put their faith in institutions and believe in a top-down style of control and communication.

The Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were a lucky bunch that lived through a period of huge, sustained economic growth. A gushing natural optimism stems from the fact these nippers never saw the bubble burst.  However, the same can’t be said for the next batch. Babies born between 1965 and 1981, known as Generation X, experienced the fallout from the decline of heavy industry, recessions and the explosion of media, a combination that produced a far more cynical, fiscally cautious generational bracket. 

And finally, the Millennials – born between 1982 and 1995. These dudes live their lives online. They are part of communities. They share, they influence and are influenced.

“If the boss asks a Traditionalist or a Baby Boomer to jump, their natural response is to ask “how high?” Generation X asks why.  The Millennial, on the other hand, screams “screw you!” This illustration is, of course, designed to make the audience laugh. But Lear’s point is crystal clear. Rather than obey the instruction, youngsters nowadays go online to find out who else is jumping, where and when they are jumping, and if anyone actually enjoys the act of jumping at all. 

Amy Lynch spends most of her time making organizations become more efficient by helping them engage effectively with each generation on the staff. Her advice to the gathered travel managers was simple and direct.

“Use simple language at all times, but when it comes to the travel program, use all the features you have available to you. The Millennials demand the bells and whistles of consumer apps. At the same time, never assume that Boomers don’t want to be on the cutting edge of technology.” A very good point; though online is second nature to the Millennial, the Baby Boomers can afford to buy all the gadgets!

“Your only option with Millennials is to be transparent, don’t be tempted to sugar coat your policy directives. Yes, they may resist and they will question the process. But you should listen. You may just find a way of making things more efficient.”

The over-arching message for travel managers is that if you are going to devise and deliver a successful policy and program, the ability to be generationally multi-lingual will be a pre-requisite for success. Otherwise, as was the case with the six-year-old Tooth Fairy denier, you could be missing fantastic opportunities.