Before Travelocity and Expedia (NASDAQ:EXPE) popularized online travel portals, Sabre used communication technology to offer a popular global distribution system to bricks-and-mortar travel agencies. Sabre Travel Network now services old-school establishments, as well as online bookers, with real-time rate and availability information.
Every content deal matters in this space. Selection is the key to keeping web-savvy users coming back to plan more trips, and it's bad enough that most portals won't offer what discounted carriers like JetBlue (NASDAQ:JBLU) and Southwest (NYSE:LUV) have available. Losing out on the inventory of Continental's 3,200 daily flights would have hurt both Sabre and the airline.
Breadth of information is already a challenge for the leading online travel sites. Users are turning to aggregators like SideStep, which scours service providers directly. Even Priceline.com (NASDAQ:PCLN) has tweaked its "name your own price" gimmick, now offering a more conventional travel portal alongside its bid-for-travel service.
Whether online travel portals will still be relevant in a few years remains to be seen. At least Sabre is making sure that it remains useful to both travel agents and online travel seekers.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz still relies on the portals to get basic travel information, but then he runs off to see if he can get better deals straight from the provider. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story.The Fool has a disclosure policy. Rick is also part of theRule Breakersnewsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.
