Focusing on social networking in the business travel space

Sabre Travel Network is to launch the first Enterprise 2.0 Community Platform developed specifically with travelers in mind, called cubeless.

American Express Business Travel and Sabre are working to partner on the initial launch of cubeless, which is scheduled for mid-2008.

According to Sabre, the cubeless platform is designed specifically for facilitating the sharing of knowledge and expertise throughout a corporation's most valuable knowledge base: its employees.      

The focus will be on corporate travelers, offering cubeless as a new module from Sabre's GetThere corporate booking solution and a long-time partner of American Express Business Travel.

"cubeless allows you to connect and benefit from the collective experience and expertise of your fellow travelers or colleagues," said Tom Klein, executive vice president for Sabre Holdings and group president of the Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Airline Solutions businesses. 

"For those folks that the road is as much their office as where their desk is, getting information they know they can trust is just invaluable," he said.

cubeless facilitates this collaboration so the road warrior business traveler can quickly, easily, and even automatically, get advice from people within their company that do what they do, have the same travel policies, and have been in the same locations providing their best resource for getting input about their trip.

"It can be anything from finding out about services to help support their business trip in a location others have been to, to what nearby restaurants are opened all night for a quick bite to verifying that a hotel they want to stay in has dependable, fast wireless internet access and a gym that is open early in the morning," said Klein. 

Sabre launched its own, employee community of cubeless in 2007. Born out of the work from Sabre Travel Studios, employees have used the power of the connected community to build their knowledge, find a certain skill set for a work team, and check out travel information such as the best mode of airport transport to the local office or just simply which hotel has the best location or service for an upcoming trip.