BTN EVENTS: Vendors Face Off At TTW

<B> BTN EVENTS: Vendors Face Off At TTW</B>

By David Meyer

Travel managers should bring their IS people to the Travel Technology World conference

and exhibition at the Chicago Hilton Oct. 13 and 14 for a unique program featuring product face-offs for each of the three pieces of end-to-end travel management automation.

Business Travel News editors, working with corporate buyers, consultants and vendors, and in association with the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, will hold sessions in which four vendors will simultaneously display features and performance of their systems for online booking, management reporting and expense processing. The face-offs will be held in the forum area located at the center of the show floor. In each of the three face-offs, vendors will demonstrate features and answer questions about their products posed by a panel of experts, which will include two corporate buyers and one consultant, and the audience.

Panels Of Experts

For online booking, the panel is consultant Bob Langsfeld, and travel buyers Bob Lichtman of 3Com and Jeff Kern of Hewlett-Packard. For management reporting the panel is consultant Norm Rose and travel managers Cynthia Perper of Colgate-Palmolive and Jonathan Stobart of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons. For expense processing, the panel is consultant Shimon Avish, and travel managers Jim Peterson of Yellow Corp. and Al Derga of Case Corp.

Vendors invited by those panels who have confirmed their participation are: for online booking, AXI, Sabre BTS, E-Travel and ITN; for management reporting, Hi-Mark, ISP, Northstar and Vantage Point; for expense processing, Captura, Necho and Portable.

The two-day program also includes panels of corporate pioneers discussing their experiences in using online booking and expense systems. The forum area also will be a venue for a couple of travel managers to show how they are maximizing the use of their corporate intranet travel pages.

General sessions during the two-day show will include a Tuesday lunchtime keynote speech by Unisys vice president of outsourcing Robert Evans about data warehousing and outsourcing, and a Wednesday morning panel of senior CRS executives including David Jones of Amadeus, Jeff Hoffman of Worldspan, David Near of Galileo and Eric Speck of Sabre discussing the state and future of computer reservations systems.

The program also includes sessions on corporate meetings technology, the IS-travel manager relationship, smart card travel applications, speech recognition, integration with enterprise systems, such as Oracle and SAP, and CRS bypass and direct settlement.

Confirmed business travel managers also involved in the program so far are Nancy Godfrey, Chevron, Hanna Murphy and Stephan Meyer, Siemens, George Odom, Eli Lilly, Terry Sullo, BBN, and Richard Wooten, Monsanto.

Confirmed vendors and industry experts to date include Ian Clark, IT manager at Texas Instruments, Elmer Baldwin, Via Worldwide Network, Ralph Bernstein, U.S. Bank, Pamela Codispoti, American Express, Steve Cossette, Continental, Robin Craven, The Alliance LLC, John Davis, Pegasus, Mike Hulley, IBM, Shafiq Khan, US Airways, Jeff Rasco, hmr.associates, Steve Reynolds, Travel Technologies Group, Rolfe Shellenberger, Runzheimer International, Richard Spradling, Maritz, Ed Tromczynski, Plansoft Ajenis, and Tom Wilkinson, Travel Management Group.

For more information, call the Miller Freeman conference registration department at (212) 615-2274.