Travelocity CTO: Barry Vandevier

Dan: Barry, Thanks for joining me.

Barry Vandevier: Thanks Dan for having me.

Dan: Now Sabre Holdings has been around for a while in the travel industry as an infrastructure provider to many other travel companies, and it seems to me that in the travel industry there are some big players such as yourself, and Orbitz, Expedia, and others. How do you differentiate yourself from a technology perspective?

Barry Vandevier: We focus very much on customer championship and making sure that we're there to support the customer from when they're dreaming about their vacation or dreaming about their trip, or planning their trip, all the way through their travel and beyond post travel. And so our goal is to really ensure from a technology perspective, we are able to support our customers early on and we have been really focused on kinda the dreaming, planning, shopping aspect and feel we have done some very innovative development within that phase of the trip, but then we've been also very heavily focused on the customer during the travel and post travel. So we put a lot of focus on technology within our call centers, for our agents to support the customer, a lot of automation for our customers. For instance if a customer is traveling to a certain location, we find that there is an issue with the hotel, we can contact and help not only that customer with that trip but we can help all customers heading to that hotel.

Dan: So basically the base technology that all the travel, online travel companies use is fairly standard but it's that customer relationship management on top of it that gives you some unique differentiation?

Barry Vandevier: Our focus at Travelocity is to ensure from a product perspective while from a products inventory, air, car, hotel, all the different extras that you'll find at a destination, that we can package all that together into a product and differentiate based on the full experience well beyond just the product itself.

Dan: Now what's an example of this full experience and how you used technology to give yourself an edge over your competitors?

Barry Vandevier: So we are in process with a product in beta we call Experience Finder that is very focused on the destination and the experience of the destination. So it's much more about. It's much more than how you get to the location and how you are staying but the full experience of that destination. And we're putting a lot of effort into content, into reviews, into multimedia photos, and just providing the customer the ability to view the entire destination and all the different activities. We do it by theme so whether there for instance in Las Vegas, whether you're there for a gambling trip or you're there to tour the city, we can provide various themes and content associated to those themes that give a broad variety of capability to our customers, well beyond just the product itself.

Dan: From a technology perspective, you have a very data intensive kind of application as well as performance is a big issue I would assume. So what do you do on the back end to ensure that your performance is one where the customer comes in and they don't have to wait and then leave?

Barry Vandevier: As you know in the travel space, you're talking to hundreds of carriers, 70 thousand hotel properties, 40 different car rental companies, you're aggregating a lot of content not only around the product itself but all the descriptive content and we have to be very focused on the performance. And to do that we do a number of things whether it's in the code itself or we're very focused on ensuring the data is easily accessible, certain caching mechanisms that allow quick access to the data. We also do a lot of focus on performance testing, performance tuning, and one of the nice things that's evolving in the industry is our hard work continues to evolve such that we can accomplish a lot more capability with faster CPUs now that we're working with and starting to see multi-core CPU capability. We're able to leverage the power of that and the pricing of that to really scale out a lot more content and performance and then we put our products through rigorous performance testing before we ever launch them into production.

Dan: So my question would be then, how do you create a culture of innovation among your staff and how do they process all the ideas that are coming in and get ideas and then turn them into product.

Barry Vandevier: First and foremost is empowerment and really empowering your employees to bring forth ideas and leverage them and we do it in some of the traditional ways such as research and we have a labs environment where we can test out new technologies and experiment with those technologies in a beta type presence. We also do it in terms of providing, some of our employees will take a little bit of time on their own to explore new technologies. We also do some formal products. Yahoo introduced the Hack Day concept and we participate in Hack Day within the entire Sabre environment where we do across all of our global locations, every year, we have different various locations participating in a one day hack day where our employees are able to go in and experiment for 24 hours and we make it a contest and so that's an example. In fact a recent example is we had an employee out of one of our offices in Sydney who participated in hack day, won the hack and it was about a mashup so when we talk about Web 2.0 one of the big buzzwords is mashup, where you are combining multiple content, maps, various different content, and so that hack that they won on, where actually the business liked it so much, that we're actually working to get that incorporated into a product.

Dan: And what was that hack?

Barry Vandevier: Well I don't want to. Because we haven't launched it publicly, I don't want to talk too much about it but it's really about using maps and using to content and really being able to provide our customers more capability in terms of where they're going, their destination, and what they can see.

Dan: It would be kind of interesting to have a map and then just pin point on the map where you want to go and then have the software just bring you back results.

Barry Vandevier: Absolutely and we do have the ability, we have a lot of mapping capability already on Travelocity but absolutely that's something we'll continue to focus on. In fact the Experience Finder product I told you, we're very focused on the destination experience. The map component of that is very important in that we provide our customers where they know exactly where they are and what facilities are available what products and capabilities are available at their destination.

Dan: Now that kind of Experience Finder, Is that something you're going to provide on mobile devices so I can be walking around in any city and be accessing that over some 3G network, Edge network or whatever it might be?

Barry Vandevier: Yeah for sure mobile devices, as everybody knows, are just expanding in use and capability every single day and our goal from a travel provider is to provide our customers as much information as we can and they want for a particular destination whether it be flight information, whether it be information about the destination, information such as tickets and the location so those are all capabilities and products that we want to ensure are available to our customers.

Dan: Now green is another one of those hot topics right now in terms of technology. From a data center perspective, what are you doing to make yourselves more green and is that something you consider to be important from an economic standpoint as well as a public policy?

Barry Vandevier: We do. In fact, I'll give you a couple of examples. From a data center perspective, absolutely, in terms of the server footprints and in terms of moving towards CPUs and hardware that use less power and require less cooling. I mean those energy costs take up a big portion of powering of the cost around the consumption of our hardware. So focus on smaller footprints and products that require less energy is a big focus for us, but there's another area that we're very focused on at Travelocity and that's our Go Zero program which is a carbon offset that allows our customers to donate money and all the money is put towards the program that then trees are planted that can offset an entire trip. So if you take a trip and schedule a trip, you can donate 10 dollars and that will apply towards a carbon offset for that entire trip and so that's been a big success for us here in the U.S. and in Europe and a big focus for us from an environmental perspective.

Dan: Now you must collect a lot of data and interested to know what you do with that data in terms of the feedback loop and some of the tools that you use to make obviously to get yourself to a higher level of efficiency and also to use that data to help improve the user experience?

Barry Vandevier: Yes, absolutely. We have been focused on data acquisition and warehousing since in the 90s and we load today into our warehouse about 40 gigabytes per day of data. That's only focused on the shopping and booking data that we can use to provide our customers better experiences. So we can use to provide much more personalization around not only the CRM and email campaigns but also when you visit the homepage you can personalize certain content to support exactly what that customer has been and may be interested in and we have found for sure that the more we can provide our customers valuable responses that are specific to what they are interested in we provide not only much more value to our customers but to the product itself. So that's been a big focus for us.

Dan: As you look out into the future and from what you've been talking about, it sounds like the notion of a travel agency, an online travel agency, is really changing. It's involving rich content; not just planning and ticketing for various services. How do you see this evolving into the future? I mean it almost sounds like it'll turn into an immersive kind of game at some point.

Barry Vandevier: Well it's certainly going to get more interactive and you hear a lot of the buzzwords around Web 2.0. Now you hear about Web 3.0 in terms of the search and semantic web and content is just going to continue to perfluate and as you look to where the hardware and technology is moving and the continuous, the Moore's law, and getting to much faster capability, we can leverage all that to provide a much more rich experience to our customer, a much more interactive experience to our customer.

Dan: And finally from a software development perspective, what are you using on the back end to ensure that you can be very rapid in incremental in your development as all these new technologies you were talking about, whether it's java and Linux, or Web 2.0 technologies that mashing all that up together and really moving it at a speed which right now seems to be very fast in terms of the incremental innovation that has to go on?

Barry Vandevier: Yes. It's very very important for us that as we build out our products and services we do so in a service oriented architecture approach and that allows us much more flexibility as we roll out new features and functions that we can do it within the components of a specific service and so it enables us to some degree divide and conquer because we can build out a structure of our services and this is another example of where the technology has improved that enables us to pull together various services from different places and in the travel business, coming from different products, whether it's air, car, hotel, destination experiences, content, travel reviews, pulling all that together into a cohesive product for our customers and building that in a services oriented architecture allows us to do so within each component gives us much more flexibility in terms of new features and functionality and allows us to move faster as the product technology and our customer needs evolve.

Dan: Well Barry, Thanks very much for speaking with me.

Barry Vandevier: Great. Thanks Dan. I appreciate you having me.

Dan: I've been speaking with Barry Vandevier, who is the CTO of Travelocity, and the CIO of Sabre Holdings. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.