Career Shift: Can't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
<B> Career Shift: Can't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow</B>
By Cheryl Rosen, Executive Editor
In 1991, my first year at BTN, I wrote a story about an agency acquisition scheduled to close over the weekend. After interviewing both agency owners, the issue went to the printer on Friday with my story on page one. There was just one hitch: On Saturday, a single detail arose that could not be settled, the whole deal unraveled--and Monday's BTN announced an agency acquisition that never took place.
As a journalist, that episode is a constant reminder to me that predicting the future is a risky business, even when everyone is positive of what tomorrow will bring.
Maybe that's why I'm so fascinated by a new and surprising wrinkle I'm seeing in the fallout from agency fees, which seems to be having a positive effect on the careers of travel professionals. Speaking to many of them for this year's Salary and Attitudes Survey (see story, page 44), I noticed a renewed sense of confidence and optimism about the future.
As agency fees force companies to shift their image of the travel department from a profit center to a cost center, professional travel managers are gaining a new respect--one measured by the size of the budgets they manage rather than the rebate checks they collect.
"It used to be that the travel department made a profit of $300,000, and the travel manager got a piece of that as his bonus," one global travel manager told me. "But now there is no profit. Now they are basing my bonus on the overall performance of my program and the bottom line cost savings I deliver--and that's a figure limited only by my imagination."
Having built a travel Web site with security updates and an automated expense reporting system, he found his $5,000 raise dwarfed by a $35,000 bonus this year--the largest he has ever received.
Now that's an outcome of the airline commission cuts he never expected!
For me personally, watching all these changes from the vantage point of BTN's managing editor has been difficult. While it's been terrific fun working with our reporters on all the stories in BTN for the past two years, it's also kept me behind a desk for long hours--and the reporter in me has missed the real action of sharing insights into the expected and unexpected events that herald the future of the travel industry. So it seems an opportune time for my own career move, to executive editor, covering the hotel beat and online booking.