Save easySABRE campaing -- please join!!
 

As you know, easySABRE the venerable and original online travel service, is being killed with the convenient Y2K excuse.

Not only this is bogus -- it's just a front end to SABRE, and the latter is Y2K compliant!! -- but killing easySABRE would deprive us with a lot of functionality.

Their email says that the decision is final -- bogus! Every decision is REVERSIBLE, by the appropriate people. In this case, it happens not to be the 20-year old sitting behind a computer who responds to the email address they sent us.

Here's who we should be writing to:

Michael Durham
President & CEO
The SABRE Group Holdings
4255 Amon Carter Blvd.
Fort Worth, TX 76155

In addition, if you are Gold/Platinum/Executive Platinum, you should drop a line to American Airlines (they own 80+% of SABRE) highlighting, amongst other things, how influential easySABRE has been in making AA your preferred carrier. The address there is:

American Airlines
Executive Office
PO Box 619616, MD 2400
DFW Airport, TX 75261-9612

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take 5 minutes of your time to write one of the above. Some of the things that you might want to highlight some very important benefits MISSING from Travelocity:

* Ability to view choose flight classes, which enables us to reserve a fare other than the "lowest"
* Ability to pick connection point -- a necessity when doing travel to Europe or Asia/Pacific to avoid weird routing or to force it to choose an AA-based routing
* Ability to select "premium" seating on AA -- i.e. seats reserved for Gold/Platinum/Exec Platinum; Travelocity displays them as occupied even if they're not
* Ability to change seating on an existing reservation without having to call AA
* Ability to view schedules for any day -- not just TODAY -- so that we can plan
* Ability to see fares for specific departure and return date -- not just all fares for a specific departure date
* Speed, speed, and speed.

At least, a victory would be to have those issues fixed in Travelocity *before* they kill easySABRE!

If you can, please post your letters, so that others can "borrow" from them.

Let's show AA/SABRE the *power* of frequent flyers!

Do you have a fax number for these guys?

Supposedly, the fax number to the AA
Executive office is (817)967-4162, but they
have not responded to my fax of a few days
ago requesting a call-back from Michael Gunn.

Travelocity had a stand at Comdex this week and I asked them about moving the fare class avilability over to Travelocity.

Forget it was their answer. "It's [easysabre] way too complicated for the normal user - that's why were killing it".

Don't hold your breath I'm sorry to say....

Spike -

Perhaps you should remind them who uses easySABRE. Not their 'normal' users who shop for the cheapest fares in the world and at that might not even book it in the end.

easySABRE customers are the BIGBOYS and GALS who travel full fare in Coach, Business and First. They book car hires, hotels .. (Most of my hotels I've booked costs over $400 a night at easySABRE).

Perhaps this will jolt their decisions.