Though many corporations recently have modified their internal structures to align travel and meetings management, the executive atop the new structure—the travel buyer—today typically earns no more compensation than those travel executives who have nothing to do with meetings management, according to a recent Business Travel News survey.
According to the 2003 Travel Manager Salary & Attitude Survey of 573 travel buyers
(BTN, Aug. 11), the compensation scale for executives whose responsibilities include meetings management and the scale for those who don't are almost exactly the same. About 30 percent of respondents in both categories make more than $90,000 in annual salary, benefits and incentives, and about 11 percent in both categories earn less than $40,00 annually.
The lack of dichotomy is critical for many travel executives, as many corporations have taken steps to converge travel and meetings management. Usually spurred by overall corporate cost-cutting measures or a desire for better data during supplier negotiations, that convergence typically involves the shifting of the meetings management responsibilities away from individual corporate departments or divisions to a single corporate travel, meetings or procurement department.
Though many travel executives regard the management of a corporate meetings program as a significant increase in responsibility, senior management, it seems, does not typically share that feeling. "At that level, employers expect to get that skill set as part of the package," said Denis Day, senior partner of The Day Partnership, a Downers Grove, Ill.-based travel industry executive recruitment firm. "Those salaries are focused on the skill sets of the person, the size of the corporation and its travel spend."
Corporate senior management often does not necessarily view the assumption of meeting and group travel responsibilities by corporate travel executives as a broadening of their roles. Rather, Day said, travel executives receive higher compensation by assuming the responsibilities of corporate functions not directly related to travel management.
"I have absolutely seen several executives do very well by taking on food service, facility management or lease management responsibilities, as well as travel," Day said. "They are paid well for that responsibility, equal to other vice presidents within their companies."
The number of travel executives who manage a meetings program—anecdotal evidence suggests the number of meetings executives who assume responsibility for transient operations is far smaller than the reverse—is on the rise. More than 65 percent of the travel buyers who responded to the salary survey indicated that they manage meetings. Of those buyers, about 13 percent said they assumed those responsibilities within the past two years.
Yasuo Sonoda, San Francisco-based Macromedia Inc. travel manager, is one such travel buyer. Sonoda said he took over meetings management within the past year of his own volition and received no additional compensation specifically for that move. "There was no additional compensation," Sonoda said. "Meetings were not mentioned when I was hired, but I assumed them because it makes sense to consolidate meetings for better leverage in negotiations. I had to convince senior executives of that." Sonoda added that his title and position, and its commensurate compensation, was unlikely to be changed until the program becomes significantly larger than its current midmarket state.
The trend of travel executives assuming meetings shows no signs of abating: Of the 35 percent of buyers surveyed who indicated they do not currently manage meetings, about 21 percent said they expect to do so within the next two years. Despite that trend, industry recruiters said the trickle-down effect is minimal: Few employers seek travel managers with meeting planning experience or meeting planners with transient skills, but those employers seem to expect executives in those fields to be able to handle both.
"People with positions open are not requiring experience on both sides now," said Dawn Penfold, president of The Meeting Candidate Network, a New York-based meetings industry national search firm. "They're still considered vastly separate in that sense. There are requests for candidates with meeting and incentive experience, for example, or the ability to handle ticket processing. When we get a corporate travel position, it doesn't require meetings management experience." These days, Penfold said, few travel executives leave high-paying jobs that require the skills to manage both. "The problem is that the people who have experience in meetings and travel are usually high-level directors, not individual meeting planners or travel managers," she said. "The director may oversee both sides, but those are high-level positions, and they are not opening up in this economy."
Other notable meetings-related findings of the salary survey include a notable geographic split in travel buyer responsibilities: Only 58 percent of respondents from the Northeast said they have meetings management responsibilities, well below the percentage of respondents from other parts of the United States: Seventy-two percent of southern respondents, 68 percent from the Midwest and 67 percent of those polled in the West have those responsibilities. The South is the clear hotbed of meetings and travel convergence. In addition to having the highest percentage of respondents with meetings management responsibility, the region also has the highest percentage of buyers who expect to take on that responsibility in the next two years, 38 percent.