Consultant Wilkinson Goes To GetThere
<B>Consultant Wilkinson Goes To GetThere</B>
After five years in operation, Tom Wilkinson last month packed up his Travel Management Group consulting business to join GetThere.com as senior director of business travel solutions. Wilkinson officially began his new role last week and is working out of his home office in Pennington, N.J.
Reporting to GetThere's vice president of strategic services Jeff Palmer, Wilkinson is responsible for helping GetThere clients develop new management models to support increased adoption and use of the company's booking system. Wilkinson said he plans to "focus on supporting the needs of both companies, which still outsource travel management to an agency, and self-managed companies, including CTDs and rent-a-plates. I view it as 'applied consulting.' "
A former trial lawyer, Wilkinson began his career in travel management consulting during the late 1980s with Caldwell Associates before starting the Travel Management Group in 1995. "I've always been totally jazzed by technology," said Wilkinson. "Increasingly, my travel consulting had focused on helping clients understand Web-centric travel management. There are a lot of other trends in the industry that go along with this, such as direct contracts with suppliers, and I think the booking tool is really the center of a new way to manage travel and take advantage of all these trends."
Wilkinson said there was nothing about consulting that turned him away. He said he was busy as ever, even in his company's final days. "The consulting world is very strong. In the past couple years, some of the bigger consulting firms that focus on purchasing have made some real in-roads in the travel business and by saying travel could and should be reengineered," he said. "But there are enough travel managers who have been able to convince their bosses that they need some specialized expertise. I've had a major issue disentangling myself because there are so many good projects out there.
"I think ultimately I would go back to consulting if this didn't work out," he said. For now, though, "It's a real gas to be able to implement what I was recommending.