Sabre Travel
Network has announced plans to launch the first Enterprise 2.0
Community Platform developed specifically with travelers in mind,
called cubeless.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 community features of
cubeless join together the knowledge base of employees from local to
global and makes it easy for them to share advice and recommendations
about travel and other topics of shared interest.

  American Express Business Travel and Sabre are working to partner
on the initial launch of cubeless, which is scheduled for mid-2008.
The focus will be on corporate travelers, offering cubeless as a new
module from Sabre’s GetThere - the world’s leading corporate booking
solution and a long-time partner of American Express Business Travel.
Sabre intends to continue to develop and offer community products to
other segments of the travel marketplace throughout 2008 and beyond.

  “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. 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.”

  Charles Petruccelli, president, Global Travel Services at American
Express, said, “We believe strongly in the value of social networking
in the business travel space and welcome the opportunity to be a part
of the first platform to be delivered to the marketplace by working
with Sabre on the launch of cubeless. We see cubeless as a very good
product with many attractive features. We believe it will be an
important component of a broader offering on social networking
capabilities that will enhance our ability to deliver knowledge,
better savings, service and control to our customers, while building
loyalty and engagement with our travelers.”
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