Sabre sells Trams to Tres Technologies


Sabre sells Trams to Tres Technologies

Tres Technologies, a startup that provides back-office and customer relationship management systems to travel agencies, has acquired the agency back-office system Trams from Sabre.

For Trams, it was a reunion, of sorts: Its founder, Lee Rosen, who sold Trams to Sabre 15 years ago, is also the founder of Tres Technologies. Rosen is developing a new back-office system under the Tres banner but plans to continue to support Trams and its products (Trams Back Office, ClientBase and ClientBase Merketing Services) as long as agencies still want to use them.

“We think the benefits of Tres will make so much sense that people will want to [make the switch],” Rosen says.

Rosen founded Trams in 1987 with the goal of bringing modern technology to travel agencies in the form of a back-office system. In 1995, the company bought customer relationship management tool ClientBase.

He sold Trams to Sabre in 2006 and left Sabre in 2009 after working for those three years as executive vice president of Sabre Leisure.

About six months ago, Rosen founded Tres Technology, gathering team members who collectively have about 200 years of experiences with Trams. They started writing a new back-office program, which will begin to roll out in the next couple of weeks. Sabre, Rosen says, recognized his passion for agent back-office systems and agreed to a deal in which Tres acquired Trams and all of its assets.

“If and when [agencies] are ready to migrate to the newer platform and the newer benefits, it’s basically going to be the same pricing, and it’s the same company behind it,” Rosen says.

Pricing varies, but agencies typically pay an agency fee of around $80 per month (that fee is $50 per month at the low end and $250 at the high end for, for example, a large host agency). Then, agencies are billed $10 per user, per month.

The biggest difference between Trams and Tres, according to Rosen, is that Tres is a better technology platform that facilitates more integration possibilities. The technology itself is better, and its compatibility with today’s systems (for instance, Outlook and MailChimp) is better.

“Tres is very much designed for today,” he says, opposed to Trams, which is more than 30 years old. For example, in Tres, travel advisors can market to individual travelers. That wasn’t an option in Trams.

Since announcing Tres had acquired Trams, Rosen has gotten good feedback from the agency community.

“The encouragement we’ve gotten has been beyond my wildest dreams,” he says.

And while Tres will begin to roll out to agencies soon, Rosen emphasizes that Trams will still remain fully supported.

“Yes, we bought Trams, and yes, we’re developing Tres, but we’re not going to pull the plug on Trams by any imaginable way,” he says.

He also says Tres will not have all the functionality every agency needs right away; for instance, it will debut with its Sabre interface, but the Travelport interface won’t come until a month later. He estimated Tres will be ready to onboard most agencies by the summer or fall.

* This story originally appeared on Travel Weekly


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