I was in Krakow, Poland recently, meeting with a man named Tom Klein. Tom is group president of Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Airline Solutions. The average business traveller will have never heard of either of those companies but it is virtually certain that part of your business trip will have been made possible by their products.

Sabre is one of the biggest technology companies in travel. It is Sabre’s technology (or one of its equally little known rivals) that allows you to walk into Backwater Travel in Lower Tinybrook and book a seat on Genghis Khan Airlines of Outer Mongolia.

But that’s not all. Many of the world’s airlines buy software from the firm to help them set their fares – a process known as revenue management. This software takes all sorts of information – how many people booked on the same day last year, how many have already booked on the same flight, what major events are happening, what proportion of travellers are unlikely to show up for the flight, what other airlines are charging on the same route – and crunches it all to come up with the price of a ticket. And that price may change several times in a single day. Get the fare right and the airline makes money; get it wrong and it plunges into the red. It is complex stuff and airlines spend millions of pounds on the technology.

The company also has software that helps them calculate the optimum amount of fuel – rather crucial when airlines are spending billions of pounds a year on it.

But Sabre isn’t just about helping airlines raise fares and reduce costs. I was in Krakow to have a tour around the company’s product development centre. The company uses bright young graduates from the city’s universities to come up with cool new technical innovations. One team was working on a clever algorithm that will eventually help travellers find the very cheapest fares. I didn’t hear the phrase “Google of air fares” bandied about but you could see that was where they were going.

With the company’s figurative finger in so many pies, Tom is obviously a man to listen to when it come to travel. So what did he have to say?

“Air travel is going to get more expensive.” Groan – the last thing that business travellers and the companies they work for want to hear. He also believes that if oil prices rise even further, governmental intervention will be inevitable. Add-ons fees – the charges for extra bags, for getting a seat near the front of the plane or for changing your ticket – are going to become more common too, he says. Naturally, his company is well placed to capitalise on this.

Sadly, it’s too late to buy shares in the firm. Private equity investors Silver Lake and Texas Pacific snapped it up for $5 billion at the end of 2006. Even at that price I think they got a good deal.