On Wednesday night at The Parlur at the Sheraton Denver Downtown
Business Travel News hosted the 41st
Annual Travel Manager of the Year and Best Practitioners awards and reception
with more than 300 of the industry's top corporate travel and procurement
professionals in attendance. Award recipients were chosen by BTN editors from
nominations submitted by the industry. BTN Editorial Director Elizabeth West
announced the winners, recognizing McKinsey & Company’s director of travel
and events technology Jamie Stewart as the 2025 Travel Manager of the Year. BTN named five 2025 Travel
Management Best Practitioners: Chevron’s Alicia King, Ciena’s Fazal Choksi, Pretium’s
Maria Chevalier, Salesforce’s Ryan Pierce and Zillow’s Tami Pharr.
The reception was sponsored by Accor, Air Canada, American Express Global Business Travel, Cvent,
Marriott Bonvoy and United for Business.
BTN’s 2025 Travel Manager of the Year
McKinsey & Company’s Jamie Stewart in
the past 18 months brought AI-powered, large language model booking technology into
existing Slack workflows for McKinsey & Co. travelers and travel arrangers.
He worked over the past three years with innovative startup company Skylink as
the company’s first large enterprise customer, collaborating with the
AI-innovator to advance its product to serve a complex travel program at scale
while bringing an intuitive and seamless booking process to McKinsey travelers
in a way that also advanced efficiencies and travel compliance measures.
Stewart not only worked with Skylink but
also necessarily brought American Express Global Business Travel into the innovation
mix, integrating agency content—currently, content provided only by the Sabre
GDS, but within weeks to include Amadeus content as well in McKinsey’s rollout of
the booking workflow to Europe—into the Skylink tools. With Amex GBT able to
service all bookings made through the AI tools when self-service automation isn’t
possible.
For every search initiated in the Slack
workflow, McKinsey has configured the tools to return three air itinerary options
based not only on company policy but also taking into consideration the traveler’s
profile, loyalty affinities and booking history. The options returned clearly
note which is considered the lowest logical fare selection, prompt the user for
international itineraries to book roundtrip fares instead of one-way options
and always to ask the user to book a hotel within the same workflow. While
bookers have the leeway to decline these recommendations—as well as the option
to default to traditional Concur online booking or to Amex GBT-aided agency
bookings—McKinsey has seen a 35 percent shift in Skylink users in hotel
attachment rates and 40 percent shift in Skylink users toward booking
international round trips.
The company has seen traveler booking times
dramatically decrease from an average of between 10 to 15 minutes per booking
to 99 seconds. Travelers with repeat trips are able within the Skylink-Slack
workflow to duplicate itineraries sequentially for several weeks running by
simply asking Skylink to repeat the booking for a given duration. Project codes
allow the Skylink booking tool to allocate travel expenses accordingly.
Stewart began piloting the Skylink-Slack-Amex
GBT-powered workflow in October 2024, launched it formally in North America in
April and will begin rolling it out to McKinsey’s Europe-based travelers in a
matter of weeks. McKinsey has achieved a 96 percent satisfaction rate for the
new workflow among current users.
2025 BTN Best Practitioners
Who: Alicia King, Chevron Global Category
Manager Air, Ground and Travel Analytics
What: For serving as the travel point in Chevron’s
complex, best-in-class safety and security program that manages traveler and
asset safety in some of the most complicated and geopolitically volatile regions
of the globe. King has leveraged the deep airline, airport and other transportation-oriented
relationships she established in the region particularly during the Covid-19
era to manage safety, evacuations and repatriations in and out of the Middle
East as tensions in the region have been on the rise and surged into active
conflict. BTN recognizes the agility of King’s program and transportation
suppliers to react and respond quickly and effectively.
Who: Fazal Choksi, Ciena Director Indirect
Procurement
What: Ciena was the first large client of the
first TMC to use Spotnana as its technology stack. Choksi has been instrumental
in collaborating with Solutions Travel’s Mark Walton as well as Spotnana
technology providers Sarosh Waghmar and Steve Singh in stress testing the
technology in environments outside of Spotnana’s original scope of direct
clients. The Ciena program took bold steps to scale new technology features, service and
geographic reach. Choksi’s
collaborative work has been instrumental in this development.
Who: Maria Chevalier, Pretium Global
Director Travel & Expense
What: For making the business case for and
initiating leading-edge data management practices in the SME market that demonstrate
how fast-growth companies can not only model historical data, but frame their
future trajectories to achieve direct-negotiated discounts and relationships
with travel suppliers. Chevalier consolidated data across 18 sources with her
partner Cornerstone and applied that across the Pretium portfolio of companies
to secure customized, value-driven negotiated deals with this data approach
during a time when small and midsize companies are more often being delivered
“off-the-shelf” programs from suppliers.
Who: Ryan Pierce, Salesforce Sr. Travel
Manager AMER/JAPAC
What: Working entirely with internal systems, Pierce created an
AI-powered Salesforce travel chatbot that answers and surfaces its sources to respond
to user questions about the travel program, travel suppliers, corporate
agreements and offer travel recommendations. It uses only internal Salesforce
sources to ensure program containment and compliance. An additional nomination
for Pierce called out his work in the India market establishing a visa and travel
documents portal that eases complicated processes for travelers. The next
generation of this portal will marry Pierce’s AI work with his travel documents
work and expand that to additional geographies. Pierce has established a
roadmap for the AI work to include agentic processes.
Who: Tami Pharr, Zillow Corporate Travel
Program Manager
What: For moving Zillow to an open platform TMC
partner and enabling an environment that supported a new travel strategy for a
company that had gone fully remote. The company had been challenged to manage its
core culture-building travel program that had grown to include 300 to 400 “ZRetreats”
that enabled collaboration among 100 percent of Zillow employees—all of which
were now corporate travelers. Pharr moved hotel agreements to a room block strategy
leveraging Hubli, rather than relying on a transient travel strategy, and has
saved the company more than 15 percent across two-thirds of its total travel
budget. Pharr also connected Hubli tech into Zillow’s new travel management
platform, and Zillow developed what is called a “hotel & flight tracker”
that Hubli is now recreating into its own tool to enable for other clients.