Newsmaker: Seagrams Taps Foster To Globalize Travel

Last week was an eventful one for ACTE president Earl Foster, who left the West Coast behind and leapfrogged to the hugely successful ninth annual ACTE conference, and then to his new temporary home in a Manhattan hotel room. From there, he will search for lodgings while beginning his job as the first global travel management director of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Inc.

Foster, who was the first corporate travel operations manager at Hewlett-Packard, will head a team that includes Seagram's travel manager for North America Bob De Primo; travel manager for Europe Jonathan Stobart, Dona Morgan at the Tropicana division and Dan Riley at Universal Studios, plus a new travel manager for Asia to be based in Hong Kong. Together, the travel team has been charged with "creating a world-class global travel program" that provides service and security to travelers and returns value to shareholders, Foster said.

Foster owes his new position--and a salary insiders say is among the highest in the industry--to a companywide reengineering program. He will report to John Borgia, executive vice president of human resources in the office of the president, who was given oversight of the global travel program "because he saw the value and the opportunity, and stood up and said he wanted it," Foster said.

Vice president of development Jay Scheter pulled together the company's existing travel team, brought in consultant Harold Seligman and began focusing on ways to improve the return on its $150 million annual T&E spend. The group soon recommended establishing a consolidated global program under a professional manager skilled in multinational vendor negotiations. Enter Mr. Foster.

In his first 60 days, Foster plans to lead the team in choosing air and agency partners from the bids already collected. Odds are the company will opt for two agencies, with Universal Studios retaining its current relationship with entertainment industry specialists Hoffman Travel of Los Angeles, while the rest of the company consolidates with a mega agency. With Seagram's $80 million air volume up for grabs, global discounts are on the table, as are net-net contracts and automated solutions of every ilk. "We're looking at everything," Foster said, "and will choose the option we think works best for the company and for our suppliers."

As he heads back to his East Coast roots, Foster sounds like a man who is coming home in more ways than one. Like Hewlett-Packard, Seagrams is "not a company that mandates or wants to mandate, though we do want to drive business to preferred suppliers within the cultural context of the company," he said. But while Seagram's style and overall size and global nature are similar to Hewlett- Packard's, the new position offers Foster a new challenge: the ability to control both the company's destiny and his own.

"I didn't take this job for the money; I took it for the opportunity to build a global program from the ground up," Foster said. "That's what I've been training for over the last 12 years.