I was recently reminded of an approach of converting travel bookings into video conferencing bookings. The approach works when you have a travel booking service that will make users aware of video conferencing as an alternative to travel. Better still, the approach involves the travel booking service having visibility of video conference room availability, and then proceeding to reserve the facilities for the user. By catching users who are about to spend travel money, right at the time of their spend decision, the opportunity for savings is huge. Well that is the idea.
To complete the picture, a feed is required between the travel booking service and your video conferencing room booking system. This is perhaps most simple if you use Microsoft Exchange, and simply publish free/busy information using Exchange Web Services (EWS). For organisations who use third party booking systems, or booking systems based on catering systems, this could get a bit harder. Once the rooms are booked the travel provider then sends the booking information to you video conferencing managed service provider of choice, which could just be your IT or AV team.
I was reminded of this approach by a company called Sabre, and this in turn prompted me to recall, and check-up on, similar offerings from American Express (AmEx) and Carson Wagonlit Travel (CWT). In short, I hope Sabre can succeed where AmEx and CWT appear to have failed.
The value proposition articulated by Sabre is no different to the others I have seen, save money by saving travel. The above illustration supports a customer case study for Harman International. By targeting their internal travel costs, and reducing these by 1 – 4%, the savings potentials were in the millions. Sabre made these calculations by having great historical travel data for Harman International.
No doubt cost structures vary, but in the case of Sabre, there is an upfront establishment cost and an on-going annual costs.
As mentioned earlier, both American Express (AmEx) and Carson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) have announced similar services in the past. Here is the AmEx press release from June 2010, and the CWT press release from November 2010. Admittedly both these services were based on using public video conference rooms provided by Tata Telepresence, rather than private rooms owned by their clients. About 3 years later, and the Amex service is no longer offered, and the CWT service appears defunct (no reply by CWT to my email inquiry, and their service page has one of the worst low definition promotional videos that I have seen for a long time, it ends with “contact your program manager to locate your nearest telepresence room”… not exactly advice you can action). Indeed, if you try to book a public telepresence room with Tata directly, you will, after signing up (and don’t try and use IE10), be sent an activation link that wont activate anything – while the Tata service is still active, it does not have the hallmarks of a service under rapid adoption.
I hope the Sabre offering can succeed. It makes prefect sense to me, but I guess it fundamentally relies on the private video conferencing rooms having a user experience that is worth booking in the first place, and Sabre cannot do anything about that.
