The Cubeless platform is designed specifically for facilitating the sharing of knowledge and expertise throughout the SABRE network.

Toby Cunningham tell us more about Cubeless, one of the smarter move in the travel industry.

>Toby, can you tell some information about you and the cubeless.com team.

Travel Studios is a business development arm of Sabre Holdings that was formed in mid-2007. We are a small group tasked with developing technologies and businesses that are outside of the scope of existing business units like Travel Network and Travelocity and and are innovative.

I am the VP of Business Development with Sabre Travel Studios. I have been with Sabre Holdings for over 10 years prior to joining Travel Studios and working with cubeless. I have worked in various technology and marketing roles for both the airline and travel agency businesses of Sabre.

>Can you give us some outline about your goals with CUBELESS!

Our goals with cubeless are to provide a community product that corporations can use to stimulate and capture information that is often hidden within its employee community. We want to make it easy for corporations to implement by making it a hosted service that we implement for them, and make it easy for users with a clean and simple interface that contains a lot of functionality, if users want to use it. We see cubeless as a valuable product both inside and outside of the travel industry, although our initial focus is to provide benefits to the travel industry.

>Cubeless can power most of the Sabre Holdings brand. You work now with Nexion, can you give us some stats or facts about it and the difference between Cubeless in the travel corporate World (partnership with AMEX) and Cubeless in the travel leisure World (with your Nexion brand).

We implemented a cubeless solution for the Nexion community roughly 6 months after finishing the product. Nexion travel agents have been using it to share things like destination expertise, advice on specialty customer trips and sharing positive experiences with suppliers. We also have multiple implementations inside corporations with employees as the users. In the corporate world, you’re dealing with corporate travelers so the toolset we use is slightly different. We have additional functionality for travelers to obtain advice and recommendations from other travelers on business trips they’re planning to take. Restaurants for clients and things to do when they have some spare time in the destination. They can also populate cubeless with booking information from trips they have booked via the GetThere booking tool, to ask questions about specific trips they will be taking.

What’s most interesting about communities is that they each develop their own culture. Not all of the conversations in the communities is about travel - it includes other subjects that the users think the community might know about. The types of interaction and discussion by the users in each of these environments differs based both on the users themselves, as well as the stated intents of the community to the users when they join.

>From your point of view, what are the main characteristics for building a “good” Collective Intelligence in the travel industry?

From our experience, the fundamental requirements are data privacy and security. And we’ve ensured that’s covered in our product. We also think that the identification of expertise in a community is an important part of utilizing collective intelligence in a community, and both explicit and implicit information is useful in achieving this. We’ve been focused on developing an application that can learn about relevant expertise, and help match the best information and knowledge to users needing that information within the community.
How to moderate content is also a question we often get about cubeless. Instead of giving editorial control solely to an administrator, we have focused on the helping users moderate their own environment. Users can mark any piece of content in the community for the administrator to review for appropriateness. This lowers the amount of administration needed for the community, and gives a greater sense of ownership and involvement from the users. As mentioned above, the culture of a community quickly forms and has been very effective at allowing self-moderation of content in that community.

Lastly, our product strives to maintain an interface that is easy to use but has robust functionality. We maintain a very informal tone with all layouts and messaging. Our hope users to find our product entertaining to use, and not solely be a functional “tool”. In that way, we work less to encourage trial and adoption and gain the largest amount of active users in a community in the shortest time. That’s important when you’re trying to capture as much of the expertise within a community as possible. In our experience, we’ve had over 50% participation within a couple of months of launch - even though participation in our implementations has always been voluntary. And with the successful matching of questions to answers we’ve had in our implementations, we’ve seen that entertainment and productivity aren’t exclusive to each other in this environment.

> Can you give us some Practical Applications examples with CUBELESS platform?

Certainly. We have had multiple instances in the corporate space where historical customer information was obtained that was hidden in the organization such as, “Why was term X included in the agreement with customer Y?” or “Where’s a good hotel to stay at with children in city X?”. We’ve also had corporate users find other employees who had skillsets they needed for work to be done, like “Is there anyone that knows how to develop in Java?” In the travel agent space, we have seen agents ask one another about suppliers, talk about commission policies, ask about “who’s going to Travel Event X”, and other work related questions like, “I have a client that is looking for a trip to X that includes activity Y…”. It has helped them be more productive in their daily work. Both the high adoption rates we’ve seen and the average of 5 answers per question in all of our communities I think shows the helpfulness of the product.

> Tourism is a people business and a destination experience with personal encounters. Do you think the community can leverage a destination or a product thanks a web site and tools like CUBELESS?

That’s almost exactly what we’ve seen happening in our Nexion implementation. Agents share experiences and tips with each other about their business methods, destinations, and supplier experiences. And we’re considering a broader application for the general travel agency community, we definitely think there’s something for agents to leverage with that. Potentially even with their customers (or the general public) involved sometime in the future.

>With all this travel social media network and the big social networks and communities who have shift the power to consumers, can we need a new travel agent or a new profile for the sales man in travel industry ? Like a Social Sales Managers / Travel social network animator ? Cubeless can be a tool and process to create a new travel agent?

That’s a great question.

We could see a future when online social tools are more tightly integrated into the marketing and work flow of the typical travel agent. Recruiting leads, servicing planning, in-trip communications all have .

Clearly the nature of the travel agency business is changing, and has been for a while. Agents today have either found ways to adapt to the new environment or they have left the business. As opportunities come for them to work in new ways online, I think many will adopt them. Hopefully cubeless can become part of those opportunities for them to assess.

>What are your tastes for:

>Travel destination:
I enjoy travel to South America and Europe, particularly Argentina and England, and try to visit these areas as often as I can.

>Hotel :
Some of my favourite hotels in the world are: The Alvear Palace in Buenos Aires, Argentina, The One and Only Palmilla in Los Cabos, Mexico and The Amangani in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

>Business:
Much of my business travel is on the US coasts in California and New York, primarily San Jose, San Francisco, and New York City.

>You have the micro

Again, thank you very much for the opportunity to share our product with you.

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