Sabre Travel Network and Polycom next year plan to launch a reservations platform for remote conferencing facilities that can be integrated into both corporate online booking tools and travel agent desktops.
Sabre Travel Network President Greg Webb said the Sabre Virtual Meetings booking hub will encompass both private conference rooms loaded by individual corporations and public rooms in hotels or at locations for Regus, an office-space provider.
Reserving a virtual meeting, he said, can become a seamless part of the travel arranging and booking process.
"The biggest hindrance is that these services are not in the current workflow," Webb explained. "This will enable corporations to make better buying decisions, allow travel agencies to become collaboration consultants and help employees at companies make good decisions as to when to travel."
While several booking tools, including Sabre's GetThere, already allow clients to integrate remote-conferencing policies into the booking process —messages recommending a virtual conference as an alternative to travel for internal meetings, for example — the platform will allow travelers to compare costs, check conference room availability and complete bookings within the same tool, according to Webb.
Currently, travelers determine costs through the booking tool or agent and then separately call around to check pricing and availability of remote conferencing rooms to make that comparison, he said.
"The process has become cumbersome and has impeded the ability for people to make good decisions," Webb said, later elevating his description of the scheduling experience to "horrific."
Sabre and Polycom already developed the inventory component of the platform and have been testing it with a handful of travel management companies and corporations.
The partners plan to launch the full system in the first half of 2012, including inventory from previously announced participant Cisco. The third major telepresence provider, HP, also is expected to participate, Webb said.
"Next we'll be working with the public room providers to include their inventory, and two have agreed already," he added.
In addition to its integration within GetThere and Sabre's agent desktops, Sabre Virtual Meetings will be compatible with other corporate booking tools and reservations systems, Webb said. It also will be available as a standalone website.
Polycom's executive vice president, Sue Hayden, said part of her company's focus is interconnectivity, ensuring that various remote conferencing systems can communicate with one another regardless of provider, and that travelers can use a webcam in a hotel room or a tablet in an airport.
The company is a member of the Open Visual Communications Consortium, a new coalition of global service providers working to develop such a network, she said.
"We want it to be just as easy as calling from one mobile carrier to another," Hayden said, adding how such calls were "not always as seamless as it is now."
She said the number of remote conferencing endpoints globally is expected to triple by the end of 2015, leading to "a tremendous amount of adoption."
Sabre's Webb said he does not expect such adoption to curtail business travel.
"Companies that have had the opportunity to use this for internal meetings have turned those dollars to revenue-generating travel and customer-facing meetings," he said. "As this rolls out and becomes more effective, we'll see an increase in business travel and greater ROI based on each travel dollar spent."
This report originally appeared in sister publication The Beat.