27 March 2007

Travelocity India

Tsk Tsk - Sabre heads need to take a lesson in geography. Bombay is not the name of the city - Mumbai is. Or at least be consistent with your errors.

In the new Travelocity India website www.travelocity.co.in when you do a search for a city using the rather convoluted search function (just like that awful global weather search on CNN.com) you will find there is no city called Mumbai. Although, there is a city called Bombay. However the display of hotels comes back with the correct name.

So Travelocity - which is it - Bombay city or Mumbai?

While we are on the subject of the new website - does the use of the name "Travelocity" spell the end of Zuji? Zuji which is now controlled by Sabre has never been a huge success. In fact its performance has and is rather dismal. Traffic at the other websites for travel in many Asian markets, particularly the branded supplier sites, report much better returns.

Get with the program Sabre. Wasting the value of a global brand by having a poor cousin in Asia makes no sense at all. Given the rather embarassing failure of the Japanese website Tabini - carefully hushed up mind you - its time to get the house in order. Perhaps those nice people at TPG will put some sense into the Sabre management. Or at least they can book some considerable savings from supporting a single brand.

Heck if AT&T can flip flop its brand presence in wireless AT&T Wireless --> Cingular (or is that Xingular) --> AT&T Wireless again in the space of 3 years, Travelocity can put Zuji out to pasture now.

Cheers

Timothy

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