BTN Travel Manager Of The Year

<B> BTN Travel Manager Of The Year</B>

By Sarah Welt

<I>Minneapolis</I> - When Andrew Menkes, vice president of global travel management at Republic National Bank, accepted Business Travel News' 1999 Travel Manager of the Year award here last month, he dedicated the honor to his senior management team, as well as his travelers, travel staff and supplier "partners." Noting that without their support he never could have accomplished all he has, Menkes said, "if nothing else, I'd like to be known as the person who got rid of the word 'vendors.' Vendors sell fruit from a pushcart."

BTN selected Menkes for its 15th Travel Manager of the Year award because of his success with Republic's $6 million global travel program and in reshaping the industry as the chief proponent and ambassador for the Airlines Reporting Corp.'s Corporate Travel Department program. After securing ARC's first CTD accreditation for Republic, Menkes either invited in or showed the way to most of the companies that followed in his footsteps. "Andy gave us the confidence to move forward," said ARC's director of agency accreditation services Barry Lemley said.

BTN editor-in-chief David Meyer noted that Menkes, a 25-year industry veteran who worked as both an airline and agency executive and who only became a travel manager two and a half years ago when he joined Republic, also designed the company's globally accessible intranet site, developed a pre-trip reporting package and an expense reporting system with his IT team, and negotiated net fares with all his suppliers.

Since joining Republic from Rosenbluth International in February 1997, Menkes also has been instrumental in his company's global consolidation as well as the change of corporate card suppliers. His next challenge will come when the dust settles following the intended acquisition of Republic's parent company by HSBC Holdings, an international banking group.

Menkes began his job as a buyer by applying equal measures of aggressiveness and creativity, a prescription that had served him well on the sales side. "My first week at Republic," he said, "I called the CEO and asked if I could see him. I asked to see his wallet and had him hand over all his airline, hotel and car rental company frequent flyer and gold membership cards and made copies of them. And I made sure that I changed bronze into gold, gold into platinum, and platinum into titanium. I think that adds value to the travel management program."

It's that moxy that drove Menkes to design the bank's travel intranet site himself. The intranet includes 42 pages of travel content, including policy, net fare agreement information, hyperlinks to travel "partners" as well as access to tutorials. Travelers also now have access to Galileo's Travelpoint for flight scheduling in order to be better prepared when calling an agent, since many requests were for just that sort of information, Menkes said. A limited number of employees now have access to Travelpoint's booking engine, and in the next couple of months all domestic bookings will be able to go through the product. Additionally, "sometime in early 2000" the company is planning to do "simple international online, because we can load private fares in Apollo and have them read by Travelpoint," he said.

For pre-trip reporting, Menkes conceived an idea and with internal developers created a Lotus Notes application that allows the traveler or travel arranger to fill out a trip template and submit the request to the travel department. At the same time, that request is forwarded to the traveler's department head, enabling the travel department to begin the booking process. When the department head clicks an approve button, it gives the travel department authorization to issue a ticket. The pre-trip application also has a hot button linked to the travel site.

To streamline the expense reporting process, Menkes again decided to create a tool in-house. With an internal team, "we mapped out a revised expense report designed in Lotus Notes." The next phase of development is due to be complete in two months. It will prepopulate the expense report, taking a feed from the Visa corporate card and filling in the date of the transaction, the merchant used and the amount of the transaction. "All the employee has to do is fill in reasons for the expense," he said. "That will greatly decrease the amount of time it takes to fill out an expense report and improve accuracy.