He was an engineer by trade when he joined Sabre Holdings in 1988 as a software developer.
"I was hunkered down in a cubicle for quite a while in the early days of Sabre," he says.
A little bit of luck and a lot of hard work landed him in the top spot of the Dallas-based company in 2003, managing 10,000 people in 60 countries.
Sabre, a global technology company, plays a role in all aspects of the travel industry, from giving travelers the tools to find the best airfares to helping hotels fill rooms to making travel agencies more efficient.
In March 2011, President Obama appointed him to the President's Management Advisory Board. He is also vice chair of the U.S. Commerce Department's Travel and Tourism Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Commerce.
Gilliland, 51, is no longer CEO, having stepped down from that role in August to to spend more time with his family, but remains on the company's board of directors, where he still plays a role in shaping the company's direction. (He has been succeeded by Tom Klein.) Gilliland's 10 years running the company taught him a thing or two about managing people — and customers' expectations.
He says he's had a "sensational appetite to understand more about the customer and what they wanted."
"I got a huge appreciation for their needs," he says.
Their needs are constantly changing in a world where they have access to so much information online.
And that's what Sabre, which owns Travelocity, helps airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, travel agencies and pretty much any travel company do: Present choices to travelers in an approachable way.
"As a consumer you can spend a lot of time shopping and researching," he says. "How do you … turn those choices into something that is easily consumable?"
The name of the game in travel these days is personalization, and Sabre is helping tr! avel services companies and others figure out how to make consumers think their individual needs are being met.
They're doing so by collecting data and determining people's shopping and buying behavior.
Gilliland says companies can do that by "collecting information on that last experience or last set of experiences. "
"Personalization can mean delighting customers on the next trip because maybe they had a less-than-satisfactory experience the last time," he says. "Or understanding what their shopping and buying behavior was when on your site the last four times … and making an offer that is relevant to him or her."
The best piece of advice he ever got when starting out, he says, is to "stay close to the customer."
That's why he spent much of his time monitoring customer feedback on Twitter.
"You have this opportunity to get instantaneous feedback now that you couldn't get five to 10 years ago," he says. "We have this opportunity as we roll out products, a particular model … we get a lot of immediate feedback, and it helps us understand what those customers want."
But he also made it a point to get face time with customers, even if the feedback was not all positive.
"While those may be more painful meetings than visiting the happy customer, they're the ones that give me the opportunity and visibility into where we need to improve," he says.
Gilliland believes any CEO of a travel company also has to address the problems facing the entire industry.
"Unfortunately, since 9/11, the duration of travel has grown very dramatically. So you see getting from point A to point B from your doorstep to someone else's has increased dramatically," he says. "There's lot of friction points in between, and we need to figure out how do we maintain security at levels we've enjoyed in the last 12 years or so but also improve that process?"
He's spent much time pushing for programs to expedite the entry process into the USA, such as visa waivers for trave! lers from! certain developed countries and Global Entry for registered international travelers to speed though customs.
He also supports government investment in the Next Generation air-traffic control system, which will make routes more precise and reduce congestion in the air by tracking planes with a satellite global-positioning system.
"I'm not sure the CEO has to stand out," he says. "The way I view the CEO's role, in many respects, we can be advocating for the industry."
No comments:
Post a Comment