<B> ACTE Appoints New Prez</B>
<I>BTN Names 1999 Top Int'l Buyer</I>
By Amon Cohen and David Meyer
<I>Torremolinos, Spain</I> - Ron Wagner, president of the Western division of WorldTravel Partners-BTI Americas, was named president-elect of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives immediately preceding last month's 1999 ACTE Global Conference.
Wagner will take office in April 2000 at the ACTE XII convention in Dallas. He will succeed Earl Foster, director of corporate travel for Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, who will serve as chairman with responsibility for the board of directors for two years--a role Foster takes over from past ACTE president Armand LeCompte, corporate travel manager for Hoechst Marion Rousel.
The more than 750 members in attendance generally judged the conference a success with good networking opportunities, although only 170 of the delegates were corporate buyers. The conference facilities also were excellent although the accommodation--in hotels used principally by package holiday makers--left much to be desired.
The event, co-chaired by Accor's Veronique Lapointe and corporate travel manager Cheryl Hutchinson of American Management Systems, originally was to be staged in Istanbul, but was switched earlier this year. LeCompte announced that the ACTE board also decided to donate $5,000 to the Turkish earthquake disaster fund.
Although already serving as a member of the ACTE board, Wagner has not had a high profile in the organization, especially when compared with the outspoken and visionary Foster, who has spearheaded the association's development as a powerful global force. In spite of his popularity and relish for the job, Foster is obliged to step down next year after completing his second term in office.
Wagner was selected through an extensive process by a nominating committee chaired by David Ogilvie of Starwood and comprised of Tom Barrett of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Harvey Skolnick of KPMG, George Odom of Eli Lilly, Annika Ortmark-Selebo of Ortmark & Consultants of Stockholm and Ian Epps of American Express. Savvy West Coast travel buyers who have worked with Wagner over the years, however, said he has the right qualifications for the job. WorldTravel Partners president Danny Hood, who has known Wagner since 1984, said Wagner has excellent skills and qualities for taking ownership.
"We decided that we could shore Ron up," said Hood, supporting him as he takes on the responsibility. "Our commitment to helping the industry as leaders is sweat equity."
Having a travel management company executive as president is not a first for ACTE, which was led ably by David Murphy, president of travel agency consortium CorpNet, half of ACTE's dozen years ago. But in talking with travel buyers deeply involved with ACTE, it seems clear senior management support for the commitment required to serve the burgeoning global travel management education organization was not available for several otherwise qualified candidates from the purchaser membership. The International Business Travel Association has experienced similar difficulties. It elected British travel agent Glyn Farrell, of Gray Dawes Travel, as president earlier this year.
Although ACTE has a constitutional bias toward travel managers--51 percent of the board must be travel managers--Foster said it was immaterial from which sector of the travel management business the president came.
"We looked for the candidate, not the discipline," he said. Ron will represent the industry."
Inside sources said Wagner, with 33 years in the travel business, was selected from a short list of four whittled down from a longer list of 12. He will spend the next five months putting together a slate of officers and an executive committee.
Foster, who has known Wagner for 12 years, said Wagner likely will focus on e-commerce and the integration of a global membership. The Torremolinos conference was eloquent testimony to how far ACTE has come during Foster's four-year presidency. It was the first time that more than half the delegates hailed from outside North America.
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ACTE now has more than 2,300 members, of which 37 percent are corporate clients. Growth inevitably has entailed a sacrifice of intimacy, but Foster announced plans to compensate with a series of Power Talks: invitation-only meetings of a dozen or so members to discuss a specific topic--a concept not unlike the Travel Management Education Forums employed successfully during the past year by the National Business Travel Association. Two pilot Power Talks already have been held in New York.
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The conference included a presentation on airline alliances by Air France president and CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, who afterward told BTN that Air France is working hard at making necessary software connections with alliance partner Delta. He said the allies, who will come up with an umbrella name next year, are not now seeking antitrust immunity but do share a common approach and are using a "bridge contract." He said it would take "two to three years time before the alliance could provide one-stop shopping," and noted that Aeromexico already had joined the alliance and that Korean likely would join as well.
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The ACTE Global Conference provided Business Travel News with the platform once again to name the International Travel Manager of the Year. The 1999 winner is Asea Brown Boveri group travel manager Thomas Faller who, with the support of senior management and a team of colleagues, implemented best practices that affected the company's direct expenses--through a consolidation of suppliers from 350 airlines to today having global net fare deals with eight carriers--and indirect expenses--through the deployment of a Lotus-based pretrip reporting system. He advanced company travel goals in Asia/Pacific and Latin America, implemented a CFO-mandated policy globally, crystallized data warehouse use, consolidated card spending, created a buyer hub strategy for Europe and reduced ABB air travel cost by 23 percent (<I>BTN</I>, Oct. 11).
Faller, fourth winner of the award, was preceded by Hanna Murphy of Siemens, Alan Grimley of BP and Jo-Achim Hamburger of Electrolux.
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During a session on GDS bypassing, panelist David Brown, manager for distribution strategy at United Airlines, said, "It is within our current plans to share a portion of the savings," with corporate clients that avoid booking through global distribution systems. The discount will be around $10 per booking and will not be incremental in future years.
As part of a heated debate over the eventual relationship between GDSs and Internet booking systems, Amadeus U.S. vice president for strategic business development Frank Terranova raised the intriguing possibility of the GDSs making a strategic withdrawal from some sectors of the market.
"From a GDS point of view, it may help us if some of the more simple transactions are taken away," said Terranova. Instead, the GDSs would concentrate on transactions where they are uniquely able to add value and would charge a higher price for them.
Terranova acknowledged such a strategy would be risky but that it would be difficult for non-GDS competitors to develop the necessary algorithms to compete with them.