Greeley Koch
The Association of Corporate Travel Executives in March 2007 announced the ACTE Global Centre for Research and Education, designed to spread research funding among all constituents--including corporations that purchase business travel--rather than relying mostly on suppliers. In February 2008, ACTE named TRX vice president of corporate solutions Greeley Koch as the Centre's new chair. Koch this week spoke with The Transnationalto provide an update on the Centre's activities, including a new initiative to be formally announced this month at ACTE's global education conference in Washington, D.C.
What is the latest project that the Centre is now working on?
It is going to be called ACTE Connect. The Centre is primarily focused just on research. Initially, we were doing research that is funded and around a particular issue. As we have been working on this for the last year, what we have found is that everybody's No. 1 request of ACTE as a whole is, "How do I get information on this topic? What sort of white papers have been put together on this issue? I want to see a presentation from this conference." We found that the research is out there. It's just bucketed in different places. There is some within ACTE, but there also is a lot of research and case studies done by the suppliers themselves. That information usually resides within the suppliers' domain, on their Web sites, etc., so you really have to go search for it. It is not just the people in the travel business. Wall Street analysts and all sorts of folks want to know about travel and always are asking where to find the information. We'll be collating and collecting all these white papers, research documents, articles, webcasts and presentations from groups around the world and bringing them into one central repository with search capabilities that will be accessible to anybody--whether they are a member of ACTE or not--for free. We'll be rolling this out in D.C. in two weeks, but to date we already have 400 different pieces of research material loaded, tagged and ready to go with keyword searches. Eighty percent of the data now in there is less than 12 months old, and 30 percent is less than three months old. It is information that is relevant to the issues today, as well as future-looking. Within the ACTE Centre, we'll be convening groups of a cross-section of people within the industry and probably even outside the industry--probably semi-annually--to brainstorm the sort of research we want to be going after, either to commission ourselves or look to have others commission. We've always had a reputation of being impartial and taking in different views. That is why we have been able to get all these research papers coming in to us. In D.C., we'll be able to say that "ACTEConnect.com is live, you can go to it, don't need to be a member, don't need to log in and don't need to pay anything."
How do you vet the legitimacy and validity of research before including it?
There will not be sales material in there. The final say will be with the ACTE Centre board of directors, but, on a day-to-day basis, we'll have a staff person looking at the papers coming in. It has to be true research.
Can you summarize the topics of the research that has been collected to this point?
There will be many of the usual suspects: online adoption, policy control, cost containment (which is especially important today given the economic situation), green initiatives, corporate social responsibility, duty of care, mobility and the other things that touch travel managers' lives. So we'll have meeting planning documents in there, and we are also doing some outreach into the fleet world, because some travel managers also have fleet responsibilities. We'll also have purchasing information and procurement documents, so some directly focus on the travel industry, and some are complementary to it, given the responsibilities of the folks involved. Ultimately, we'd also like to bring in some of the corporate-driven case studies--the best practices within corporations themselves. We're also reaching out to other associations to have their conference presentations drawn into this.
The first project announced by the ACTE Global Centre for Research and Education was on "the science of climate change." Can you provide an update and talk about what is next?
We are going through the final vetting of that report now. We have it with our board of directors, and then we will roll it out in D.C. We have two sessions planned around it. It will offer some insights into climate change that have not yet been brought forward. It is the first funded, new research we are putting out there. We were focused on getting this one paper out, and then focused on creating ACTE Connect. There is another board meeting scheduled for June, and that's where we'll take the forward view again. We'll have more on future research come that meeting.
A year into this, what interest has the Centre generated in terms of participants, funders and other interested parties, and what have you learned along the way?
There was initial interest because of the work [TRX executive vice president and original Centre chair] Susan Hopleyand others had done to get the Centre into operating mode, and that is when we had the funding for the initial research. And, quite frankly, people are waiting for that to come out so they can truly see what the Centre is doing. I think there was confusion at first. I think people were not sure exactly what we're doing. That is why we are excited about D.C., because we'll be able to answer some of those questions. A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Global Travel and Tourism Summit and, while it was primarily focused on leisure travel, corporate travel is really the foundation. I was able to talk to a lot of tourism, consulting and hotel folks from around the world, and I really got a sense of the importance of corporate travel and how that is the linchpin that holds the travel industry together. We will start seeing the sharing of knowledge between the corporate side and leisure side become even greater, and there are things in the works to make that happen and bring more exposure. The lessons learned are the more we're out there talking, the better off we'll be. That will generate the ideas for the research we'll be doing in the future.