I am a regular visitor of your site, and I regularly give my support to software and hardware developers who are looking for a mac market for their products.
This time, I’d like to tell you about Sabre, the company owned by American Airlines that provides their reservations system, and their policy towards mac users. This is probably the most widely used reservations system by travel agencies in North, South and Central America. In fact, Sabre even provides free of charge any number of PCs to a fairly large agency.
My wife is the general manager of a large travel agency in the Dominican Republic. Since she needed to help some VIP customers from home while on maternity leave, she asked for a mac solution, and after several emails and calls, we hooked up with a Sabre Team developer who actually owns a Tibook, and has a beta version of their Evoya -Sabre via internet- app for Mac OS X, which he provided after he told us of the official “no support’ policy.
Well, Evoya runs perfectly, and is 90% complete. The problem is best described in this e-mail from the developer fellow:
”Our Upper Marketing management logic follows: If more people know about it, more people may want it. (that is bad!!!) They cannot see the benefit in giving the customer the choice. When the customer kicks down the door, then they will help them. The problem is a chicken and egg problem. The customers do not know it is a choice, so they do not ask for it. I have contacts at apple. He was very nice. Not a single marketing person in Sabre will return his email.
I can only kick up so much dust. I already have a few people who dislike me.
Now …… notice I said I. If somehow demand was created, and mac people became aware they did not have to use Virtual PC. The marketing group wants me to create a demand, while not telling anyone a thing.
Did you know we also have Turbo Sabre working on OS X? Apple Corporate Travel is one of our customers. But the same management team in charge of Turbo is in charge of eVoya, and thus no official mac support.
I get calls from U.S., Canada, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Sweden, Brazil, ….. (those are just the ones off the top of my head)”
So this e-mail is to see if you can let any travel agent who might be interested in such products know that they have to openly ask for it, otherwise there won’t be any support Sabre. This might be a great opportunity for Apple, as many travel agents shy away from macs since they don’t work with Sabre, or so they think.
