How do you interpret your appointment as Head of Corporate Travel for Sabre in France?
Cédric Lefort - This means a real desire to move forward in the French marketI want to grow the business, in particular by investing in salespeople. One of my first priorities is to recruit 'hunters' to make acquisitions.
More broadly, over the longer term, what is your roadmap?
Cédric Lefort - My tasks are fairly straightforward. There are three main areas. Firstly, the strategic development of Sabre in the French market, by identifying the right partners, customers...
How do you interpret your appointment as Head of Corporate Travel for Sabre in France?
Cédric Lefort - This means a real desire to move forward in the French marketI want to grow the business, in particular by investing in salespeople. One of my first priorities is to recruit 'hunters' to make acquisitions.
More broadly, over the longer term, what is your roadmap?
Cédric Lefort - My tasks are fairly straightforward. There are three main areas. Firstly, the strategic development of Sabre in the French market, by identifying the right partners, the customers to target, the potential acquisitions on which to position ourselves, and the strategy to adopt vis-à-vis the competition. The second point is 'hunting', in other words pure acquisition to gain market share. Today, Sabre is a relatively modest player in France, with 11 to 12% of market share in France. And the third point concerns the management of existing customers, with the aim of making these partnerships bear fruit, consolidating them and offering new solutions.
Should we still call Sabre a GDS, given the way the company and the business travel ecosystem have evolved in recent years?
Cédric Lefort - Yes, Sabre is still a GDS. But the GDSs are in a slightly different position today: they are reinventing their ecosystem. They are creating new GDSs, in the sense that in addition to aggregating and distributing content, they are becoming true e-commerce platforms and marketplaces, offering aggregated multi-source content, the possibility of integrating data with APIs in any external system, and above all they are offering technological tools for agencies according to their needs. This may involve improving agent productivity with a much more modern platform, improving quality control, payment tools, etc. Theartificial intelligence is also playing an increasing role today, freeing up time for agents to manage more complex journeys and more important issues. The roadmap also means more content from different sources, which Sabre will fetch and bring together on a single platform, distributing it to agencies according to their needs and standardising the data. This means that agencies don't have to make direct connections with suppliers, particularly airlines - I'm thinking of NDC of course - because that's time-consuming to develop and expensive to maintain. This enables better management of offers and integration of data into reporting systems, for safety management, for expense tools, and so on. So there's a big focus on NDC today, but in the not too distant future we won't really be talking about it any more, because it will have become logical for NDC to be distributed across all channels.
What image did you have of Sabre when you were on the other side of the fence, working for various TMCs?
Cédric Lefort - It's a supplier I knew well from 25 years in the travel industry. Sabre was a major partner of the agencies I worked with, with a strong presence on the American market, a little on the Asian market, and less in Europe. I've always had a positive image of Sabre, but I have to admit that Sabre was much less visible than Amadeus. And when I arrived at Sabre, I discovered all that there is 'behind the curtain', all the solutions that exist. That will also be my mission: to make these solutions known in France, and to give Sabre visibility in this market.
How is AI being used at Sabre today?
Cédric Lefort - Sabre makes extensive use of artificial intelligence. For a long time, AI in business travel was used for internal purposes, to improve agent productivity. Little by little, this AI is being used for the end user. Sabre is now using it on various solutions, particularly in the hotel industry, to be able to offer hotels that make more sense to travellers in terms of their past experience, their loyalty programme and a well-defined travel policy. We also use AI for fare optimisation, to offer the lowest available fare right up to the date of departure, always based on the traveller's needs. We are also using it, as part of a test, to improve email management. This involves analysing demand and being able to make an automated offer to the traveller based on their request, or prioritising these emails based on a departure date or the very specific profile of a traveller, and better analysing their purchasing behaviour. We have a partnership with Google on the subject. All these factors should help to better manage content fragmentation. Because what's important isn't the number of hotels or airlines listed, it's showing customers that you have the offers and rates they need.
What role can Sabre play in the other big issue of the moment: CSR?
Cédric Lefort - There are obviously CSR initiatives that are internal to Sabre, but there are others aimed at agencies and, by extension, the end customer. I was talking about Google: we have a partnership with them to use everything to do with traceability and calculating CO2 emissions. This enables us to propose more environmentally-friendly offers to agencies, once again in line with a defined travel policy. We're not just going to systematically push for the 'greenest' option: we're going to take into account travel time, the traveller's well-being, any connection times, the company's desire to save money...
Have business travel habits changed in the post-COVID era, and what is the impact on a player like Sabre?
Cédric Lefort - Things have changed in terms of approach and communication. After the crisis, companies had two main objectives: sustainable development and passenger well-being. Many companies communicated objectives for 2030 and 2040, in terms of carbon neutrality for example. But strangely, very few of them had a plan. As Saint-Exupéry said, a goal without a plan is just a wish... As far as travellers are concerned, we have seen less frequent but longer, more optimised journeys. On the whole, however, we are seeing a kind of backtracking. Sustainable development is dropping down the list of corporate priorities. There is much more of a focus on costs. This industry is recovering from all the problems. It's the first to suffer when something happens in the world, but it's incredibly resilient. In the end, we realise that each time companies are starting to travel again, even with slightly different types of company. And that's the case today. So finally, if we look at the efforts that are being made in terms of sustainable development, as with the SAF in aviation, none of them are the final solution, they're all bricks. This is positive, of course, but it is offset by a significant increase in the number of passengers. Generally speaking, I can't say that there has been a real change in passenger behaviour.
How do you see the evolution of the business travel ecosystem, in particular the TMCs, with the concentration that is taking place? questions the competition authorities ?
Cédric Lefort - There have always been a lot of players in this industry, and there have always been consolidations and takeovers. In the end, that leaves more opportunities than problems. If you look at the takeover of CWT by GBT – which hasn't been done yet, by the way -But that doesn't mean it's any better! There's always room for others, and there will be other takeovers. TMCs, like GDSs, are reinventing themselves. They are no longer just ticket issuers, they are true tech companies, offering solutions, with consulting, meetings & events and development departments... They have to, especially as supplier commissions are becoming less and less important and they have to find a business model to survive. Technology is helping all these players to evolve. In my opinion, technology will never replace people in this industry. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself. We've seen this in recent years with new entrants who wanted to be more innovative than the pre-existing 'dinosaurs', and who realised that the travel industry was perhaps more complicated than that, that it needed people. And we've seen each of these companies take over a more traditional TMC... It's a dynamic and highly interdependent world. This may sound utopian, but I'm a great believer in people.
