Business
Travel News
on Monday evening named Google's Dublin-based global
travel category manager Michael Tangney its 2010 European Travel Manager of the Year.
BTN editor-in-chief David Meyer made the announcement
during the opening reception for Inicio, the NBTA Europe conference being held
in partnership with Business Travel News
in Lisbon.
Tangney's innovations include the creation of
an internal database that gives travelers access to spending caps that were
developed by calculating airline rates on 1,000 routes based on open-market
pricing, combined with rates for about 300 hotels drawn in part from reverse
auctions he has held in 40 cities. He also employed social networking to inform
the request-for-proposals process he applied to hotels that are not involved in
the reverse auctions.
While the Google travel policy does not
stipulate class of service, travelers are required to report all of their
expenditures.
In naming Tangney, Meyer
recognized his development of a new approach to managing business travel that
involves "setting caps on and tracking all individual spending,
providing travelers with the information and the latitude to make smart
business travel decisions—without requiring the use of preferred vendors or the
approved travel management company—and enabling them to take corporate social
responsibility in donating half of the difference between their individual
spending and the company caps to charities on behalf of the company."