Navigant International is Sabre’s first UK customer for Corporate.Res online booking tool

The European arm of Navigant International has become the first corporate travel management company in the UK to purchase Sabre’s Corporate.Res online booking tool for business travel. Navigant manages a global portfolio of more than £3.1 billion of business travel each year, and will be offering the product to each of its 300 corporate customers in the UK.

Navigant’s managing director, Richard Furness, said online self-booking tools would play an important future role in helping organisations to get the best value from their travel budgets.

“Corporate travel management firms can help their customers save significant amounts of money simply by giving them the ability to make basic bookings and travel enquiries online”, Furness said.

“This frees us up to concentrate on the more complicated itineraries and on negotiating the very best fares and rates for them”.

Hamish Broom, Sabre’s e-commerce and business development manager, said it had become essential for corporate travel management firms to give business travellers the flexibility that advanced technology can offer.

“If any of Navigant’s business travel customers unexpectedly needed to get from London to Frankfurt tonight, they could do so by booking through any number of online travel sites or airline-direct websites. However, by offering its own online booking facility, Navigant is ensuring that its customers can still take advantage of the rates it has negotiated for them, and that they travel within the bounds of their corporate travel policies”, Broom said.

Sabre has reported “significant” interest in Corporate.Res since its launch in September last year. The product is aimed specifically at small to medium-sized businesses, and the company particularly wants to partner with agencies that will market the product actively to this type of corporate customer.

“This is a good example of how Sabre is developing products to help travel agents market themselves more effectively by differentiating their service from that of the competition”, Broom said.

About Sabre
Sabre is the leading provider of technology, distribution and marketing services for the travel industry. Headquartered in Southlake, located in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the company has approximately 5,500 employees in 45 countries. Sabre reported 2001 revenues of $2.1 billion. Sabre maintains an ownership interest of approximately 70 percent in Travelocity.com (NASDAQ: TVLY), the world’s leading online B2C travel site; and it owns GetThere, the world’s leading provider of Web-based B2B travel reservation systems. Sabre is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: TSG). More information on Sabre is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.sabre.com.

About Navigant
Navigant International is a leading corporate travel management company. Headquartered in Denver, the company has 1,600 locations in 17 countries. Navigant has more than US$4.4 billion in annual gross airline ticket sales and is traded on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol FLYR. More information is available on the Internet at http://www.navigant.com
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