Corporate travel industry professionals in the Seattle area joke that it's incestuous, but they're not totally kidding. Maybe it's something in the coffee. The latest personnel development has Microsoft's senior service manager for global travel Richard Case joining not Microsoft spawn Expedia, but rather Cendant's Travelport. Travelport owns the Highwire corporate booking tool that Microsoft put on the map when its travel team, including Case, Jill Donnelly and then-global travel manager Zoe-Ann Bartlett made Highwire their surprise choice for a booking tool to be mandated for all of the software giant's U.S. travelers
(BTN, April 9, 2001). Having removed herself from the selection process, Bartlett then married Ken Warman, Highwire's CIO at the time.
"My path with Marka has criss-crossed quite a bit," Case said, referring to Travelport CEO Marka Jenkins, who in early April will take on a mostly part-time role as vice chairwoman, Cendant Travel Distribution Services, part of a longtime plan to free up personal time. Travelport COO Kurt Ekert will become acting CEO as the company recruits a permanent CEO or president.
Case is taking on the role of Travelport general manager of account management, for which his varied background appears to qualify him well. Case has worked in the travel industry for nearly 30 years, starting as a reservationist and working up to management with Delta Air Lines, followed by a position as branch manager with Thomas Cook handling the Intel account, among others, and then on to Oracle, Rosenbluth, American Express and Microsoft, where he's been for the past three and a half years. Jenkins had been an operations manager at Microsoft when Amex first won the account. Case said Microsoft plans to fill the travel management position, as well as to stick with the Highwire booking tool.
"What's really exciting is the fact that corporations can create models that best meet their needs, and variations on end-to-end is what will drive the market in the near future," Case said last week. "The decision process that corporations go through has to be based on how readily they will achieve compliance, which drives savings." Asked about achieving high online booking adoption, Case said, "I wish there was a silver bullet. I've seen all the different adoption plans, and it absolutely has to do with the tool, the position the corporation is in at the time of the implementation and the architecture the corporation uses to design the tool."
Jenkins, meanwhile, is hardly going away.
"Travelport is my baby and I don't want to leave it entirely," she said. Yet, the transition she is making will allow Jenkins to spend more time with her real baby, an 11-year-old daughter. "I don't want to leave the Cendant family because they have been so excellent for me, so I'm still an employee, but this will allow me to have some flexibility that I've been needing. There will still be months where I'll work a lot, but this really just relieves me of the day-to-day responsibilities of being a CEO." Jenkins said she will work with Cendant Travel Distribution chairman and CEO Sam Katz on high-level strategy.
"Marka's important personal interests were out there from the time we bought Highwire, and she has been amazing in terms of giving more than we would have imagined," Katz said. "With Kurt, Richard and the other amazingly talented people we have, we are very comfortable with the perception of Travelport in the marketplace."