It will be interesting to see what the tool looks like when it is rolled-out, screenshots for the cubeless product from Sabre are available at cubeless.com.

As we have said for quite a while: getting recommendations from colleagues and other trusted sources can make business travel a lot easier. There is no doubt that companies will embrace tools that have been available for leisure travelers as a way to increase service, lower costs and drive compliance. It will be interesting to see how the concept of “openness” and “sharing” that is the heart of Web 2.0 will look like in an enterprise environment.

One of the biggest news – at least in my eyes – at PhocusWright was the announcement by the CEO of American Express Travel that Amex would roll out a social networking site for corporate travel soon.

Here are some excerpts of what he had to say:

“Imagine the power of the wealth of expertise of our 14,000 travel counselors around the world, our 1,000 sales client managers and consulting experts … and employees of 20,000 corporate customers around the world that the new technology would allow us to harness in. What we will see soon emerging is the advent of consumer-like behavior in the managed corporate travel world … the end user being more informed, more information-equipped and hence being more global.”

“For example, our dynamic traveler marketing concept, which we plan to launch in 2008, is a pure social software technology-based solution,” he added. “Social software technology platforms will be more and more used to accelerate the base of new product development by incorporating more
strategic partners and customers into the [research and development] process. This will be further accelerated with the 2.0 concept.”

Now that even Amex is getting onto the social networking bandwagon, does anybody still not believe that social networking in travel will go corporate soon?

But how disappointing was the roll-out of another Amex social networking site a couple of days later. Membersknow.com allows Amex card members to share travel related information. However for a site built in 2007 it lacks a lot of features. If you are info user-generated-content, web 2.0 and social networking, read the terms and conditions for the program. Talk about being restrictive …

Although the sheer number Amex card holder will bring a lot of traffic to the site I doubt it will create real stickiness. But at least one big consumer brand is getting it and is starting to utilize (and maybe also monetize) all these consumer relations in a new way.