Sabre leisure boss quits while Euro responsibilities shift from London

Sabre’s vice president of European leisure travel David Brown is to leave the company.

He is expected to take up a position at another large travel business. 

The GDS said his departure was “a quite separate development” from a decision to switch responsibility for its European leisure travel initiative from its pan-European sales and marketing business in London to its national businesses across Europe. 

The move will give Sabre Travel Network’s local offices greater control of the project, designed to provide travel agents across Europe with a wider range of bookable leisure travel products, the company said.

Sabre Travel Network in the UK has given travel agents a direct connection to Vertical Group’s Magic Desktop, containing a range of bookable tour and leisure products.

Senior vice president Europe, the Middle East and Africa Richard Adams said: “We feel there is huge opportunity to give our national businesses direct responsibility for developing the leisure content they need for their own markets. This way they get what they need – not what is imposed on them from London.”

He admitted that much of the new leisure focus was a result of the recent acquisition of lastminute.com by parent company Sabre Holdings.

“The acquisition moved this entire initiative up several gears – so much more is possible now than we even dreamed of a year ago,” he said. “The recent focus of the leisure team has been to evaluate the lastminute.com assets and identify assets which could be used for the benefit of our travel agency customers.”

Referring to Brown leaving the company, Adams said: “David is a leading light in the industry and I’m sure he will remain so. He played a pivotal role in building Sabre Travel Network’s presence in the UK market. 

“It was under his stewardship that the company grew to become the main challenger to Galileo in this market, and he will be sorely missed. We are hugely grateful to him for his leadership.

“We owe David a debt of gratitude for everything he has done to help build our leisure offering since we launched the initiative a year ago. We thank him for his contribution.”

Sabre said its strong position in the German market had been used since the launch of the leisure travel group 14 months ago to build a “comprehensive leisure strategy” in other European countries. It has been examining ‘non-traditional’ sources of revenue including rail, houses, villas and cars, as well as merchandising models, Sabre said.

The group has signed agreements with hotel consolidators Conferma and Otedis, bringing the number of hotels bookable in the Sabre GDS to over 70,000. The company has also launched new no-frills airline content with Helvetic, Smartwings and Niki, real-time access to Europcar’s rates and availability information, and Sabre CruiseDirector in Europe, connecting to the reservation systems of nine cruise lines.

Report by Phil Davies