On May 14, 1984, Business Travel News was born. There was a lot of other stuff going on that year as well...
To give an idea of why I, personally, need a history lesson
in corporate travel management, here’s what was hitting in my world that year:
Madonna was lighting up controversy in a wedding dress at the first MTV Video Music
Awards, very close to where I would sit in a BTN office 20 years later. I was
reading Charles Dickens’ a Tale of Two Cities in my 6th grade
English class in Edmond, Okla.—not knowing how fortunate I would be in my life to travel on
business many times to both London and Paris, among many other incredible
cities.
Thanks to the proliferation of news channels on cable television, subscribed to by 46 percent American households in 1984, I
also caught glimpses of what was going on in the wider world. I had no idea, however, what was happening in the corporate travel world that I would eventually call home.
BTN debuted May 14, 1984
Business Travel News' May 1984 front page featured two stories that reflected the impacts of a technology revolution that would change the industry. Woodside Management Systems Inc., a consortium of 60 member agencies, was preparing what it termed its Advanced Reservation Management System, or ARMS, that in the words of bylined reporter Leo-Marc Godrich would establish "a direct multilingual link with the computer systems of 17 suppliers ... by year's end."
The system was planned to replace 32 individual supplier-programmed reservation systems at Woodside's headquarters with the aim to enable member agencies to tap into one system that could process a complete itinerary, including air, hotel and car rental reservations AND would print it out. Cool, right?
It really was cool. And it was also a risk. Computerization—or
what we might today call ‘digitization’—was impacting every player in the corporate travel industry.
Travel management companies, in particular, were grappling with transitioning highly
manual, person-to-person services into a new digital age, along with new demands on the system. According to BTN data, corporate inplant development dropped 30 percent in the first few months of 1984, prompting a broad move away from that setup for servicing corporate travel and toward a full-service agency configuration with professional travel management companies.
Investing in untested
technology when margins in corporate travel—then as now—were so thin was risky for one-off proprietary solutions that might not prove durable. But some were ready to take that leap.
The ARMS initiative was just one effort among many in the industry to
rationalize fragmented travel content and reduce the keystrokes, manual entry, quality checks and printouts required to service a single corporate travel itinerary. By January 1985, BTN reported that Woodside appeared to be $1 million over its projected budget and months behind on ARMS.
In an April 1986 New York Times article largely about the ARMS technology innovation, Woodside president and chief executive John Huggins told the outlet that no single agency could justify the huge technology investment required to serve big corporate accounts. He posited that only networks of agencies could afford to do it. Indeed, that is how Woodside funded ARMS, initially with $200,000 table antes from 10 voting agency shareholders. That $2 million investment seems paltry by today's standards, when companies like Navan and Spotnana looking to rework the travel industry ecosystem are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. But this is a new world of private equity and venture capital investment. In 1984, Woodside was funding its own future—and one iteration of the corporate travel industry's future.
The consortium was winning corporate business as well as additional agency members. Woodside went from 60 agencies in 1984 with $3 billion in total turnover to 70 agencies in April 1986 with $5.5 billion in total turnover. Not shabby. At the time of the New York Times article, members counted DuPont, Sperry, I.B.M. and Xerox among their clients. The most progressive of these corporates were looking to consolidate their travel spend with fewer agencies, but that also meant that such agencies, still operating with paper-based tickets and processes, would need service locations to match.
And this is where the front-page stories of BTN's first issue overlap. Rosenbluth, in 1984, beat out American Express Travel Management Services and three other bidders for the $36 million DuPont national account (reports say it was $100 million globally by 1986). This was the largest account win in Rosenbluth's 92-year history and it was at least in some part due to the promise of the Woodside ARMS technology and the fact that consortia member agencies boasted 677 physical agencies worldwide and would support Rosenbluth in servicing the DuPont account where the single agency did not have a physical location.
But in June 1986, just months after the New York Times piece, Rosenbluth terminated its membership in Woodside. In retrospect, Rosenbluth had eclipsed the technology sophistication and turnover of most of Woodside's other members and the DuPont account required some service configurations and location development that conflicted with Woodside's membership terms. Rosenbluth also had invested comparatively huge sums of its own profits to develop a reporting system called VISION, that operated independently of what was then a 'computer reservation system,' a move unheard of at the time. (CRSs eventually became what we know today as global distribution systems.) It also operated outside of the Woodside consortia, and fairly quickly drew clients away from Woodside, which was not known for tight reporting at the time.
Rosenbluth coalesced around a wholly owned model—in many ways, the antithesis of the consortia model. By 1997, Hal Rosenbluth told Travel Weekly the company had owned locations in 25 countries and was in acquisition talks with agencies in more than a dozen others.
That move contributed to a long-standing philosophical divide between the wholly owned and the 'networked' TMC model that was still center stage when I joined the corporate travel industry in earnest in 2008, years after Rosenbluth was acquired by its earlier rival American Express and Woodside had tightened its network standards and rebranded to Radius Travel Network.
By then, the question of providing national program coverage had graduated to providing global program coverage, with lots of conversations about how to access in-market content via online booking tools, implementing follow-the-sun strategy and the relative merits of trafficking traveler inquiries to regional call centers for round-the-clock services. And, of course, what systems could make that happen.
In so many ways, the systems and frameworks conversation is the same conversation we continue to have today. Whether it's moving from disparate reservations systems to consolidated reservation systems, from TMC networks to wholly-owned models (that's still not settled, by the way), or from closed all-in-one technology systems to a more open architecture system (which looks like today's central debate), the common core of all of these conversations and transformations is how to service that corporate traveler and corporate travel manager at scale.
In 1984, many of the structures we see as 'traditional' like global distribution systems, Airlines Reporting Corp., travel management companies and others were just coalescing into the entities we use today. After "computerization" of the '80s, we witnessed the online transformation of the '90s and early 2000s. Then we went mobile with handheld devices. Today, I believe, we are experiencing in real time how the fundamental entities of business travel management are transforming again—with cloud data, better APIs, artificial intelligence and big demands for both personal data security and personalization. And we will determine how the industry adapts and grows.
Change is hard. But if there's one thing I hope we can all learn from looking back at the history of business travel management in BTN's special 40th Anniversary series is that we can collectively make it happen. I'm excited to be a part of it and, for our audience, I can personally promise BTN will do its part to document our industry changes and help drive success. Just as we have done for the last 40 years.
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Elizabeth West is the editorial director of the BTN Group. She has reported on the business travel and meetings industries for 24 years. Beth was editor-in-chief of Meeting News from 2006 to 2008 and director of content solutions for ProMedia Travel from 2008 to 2011, when ProMedia was acquired by Northstar Travel Media and merged with BTN. She became editor-in-chief of BTN in 2015 and editorial director of the BTN Group in 2019.
Beth was 11 years old in 1984, the year BTN first published. That year, an English teacher asked her class to write letters to themselves to be opened in the year 2000. In that letter, Beth wrote that she would be a writer living in New York City by the year 2000. She got pretty close. Beth lives in New Jersey and works in NYC.