San Diego - Delegates at the National Business Travel Association's annual trade show and convention officially endorsed for a two-year term as president Suzanne Fletcher, director of travel, meetings, food services and fleet transportation for Weyerhaeuser Co. Attendees also elected as vice president Charles Franklin, manager of corporate services for American Honda, and as board member at large Paul Lang, manager of travel services for Bayer. Delegates also approved a bylaw change to allow students and educators to become association members.
Fletcher said that she plans to continue along the path of her predecessors, Kevin Iwamoto and Carol Devine, by increasing the organization's visibility on Capitol Hill and working toward enhancing its global scope. "This is not a want, this is a need. We need to globalize the organization and get beyond our borders. We need some more alliances," said Fletcher. "Six, seven years ago, who would have thought India was the place we'd all be traveling? There are no hidden corners anymore."
Developing a more involved membership base at the organization's national level is high on the list of Fletcher's priorities. "While we have made great progress toward creating a more inclusionary environment for our allied members, we can still do more," she noted in her inaugural speech to the delegates. "Our allied members are an integral part to our success, and we must recognize and value these relationships, as we are only as good as our partners. We cannot perform our roles successfully without their support."
Fletcher noted that only 5 percent of NBTA's membership at the local level is also at the national level. "I'd like to see more involvement there. We'll work on that by visiting some of these local chapters and letting them feel more a part of the national organization."
Fletcher, who embarked on her career in the travel industry at Hyatt Hotels Corp. after graduating college, worked in corporate meeting planning before moving into corporate travel at Weyerhaeuser and has been a member of NBTA for 15 years, serving on the organization's board and as chair of its aviation committee.
"I'm so blessed to be working for Weyerhaeuser. Not only was my boss supportive, but she said, 'What do you need?' " said Fletcher, anticipating the challenges of balancing a full-time career and the demands of organizational leadership. "There are weekends and nights, and I certainly want to share the wealth with our new vice president, Charles Franklin. It's a fairly new relationship, but both of us being West Coast-based should make it easier."
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The Institute of Business Travel Management, NBTA's education and research foundation, during the conference unveiled a new benchmarking tool designed to help corporate travel buyers assess the effectiveness of their travel programs.
The Managed Travel Index and Benchmarking Tool will provide users with two different kinds of measurements. The MTI measures how well a program functions operationally and can compare data with those of other programs by size of spending, type of industry and region. The Benchmarking Tool is a measure of comparative air and hotel spending that uses Federal Aviation Administration citypair fares and Smith Travel Research average daily room rate data.
Work to develop the tool began in December, with the contracted services of Partnership Travel Consulting and travel consulting firm Simat, Helliesen & Eicher and the voluntary participation of about 100 travel buyers. IBTM vice chairman Hanna Murphy, travel buyer for Siemens Shared Services, said that while the "robust" benchmarking tool is ready for people to use, it is only at a starting point and will be refined over time. "It is a very good beginning," she said. "It starts a dialogue and it gives travel buyers answers to auditors."
NBTA members can use the tool via IBTM's Web site on a trial basis through year-end. In January, the tool will be available to members for an annual subscription fee of $595.
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Tom Ridge, first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and former governor of Pennsylvania, reiterated his advocacy for the Registered Traveler program during a keynote speech. "We have a job in a post-9/11 world to make our country safer, to make it more secure, but to do it in a way that does not compromise our need to be connected globally and does not compromise our need to make sure we do everything we can to expedite domestic and international interaction of economies, people and services," Ridge told delegates. "It's important to you, it's important to your companies, it's important to the country, because it's about business. Registered Traveler pilots were limited, but they worked. It would be nice to add more cities and increase enrollment."
To the applause of the audience, Ridge added, "the Transportation Security Administration shouldn't take away nail clippers."
During a press briefing preceding his speech, Ridge said DHS has shifted its focus "in favor of monitoring who comes on planes, not what." He said biometric identification programs can help that effort, but DHS "is not going to profile."
When asked how to make sure nobody in the Registered Traveler program is a terrorist, Ridge said, "Candidly, there is no guarantee. But as you manage that risk, you also have to realize that, in a post-9/11 world, it is very unlikely a group of people can take over an airplane and turn it into a missile."
In discussing cooperation on aviation security with other countries, Ridge said, "We are working with the European Union to see if we can get passenger manifests before flights take off." Such a development, he said, would eliminate "many, but not all" instances of inbound aircraft from Europe being diverted or forced to turn back due to suspicious people on board. Passenger manifests currently are transmitted 15 minutes after departure.
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Meanwhile, in a survey of 136 travelers conducted by NBTA's Aviation Committee, only 9 percent strongly agreed that TSA is doing a good job of making air travel safe. Slightly more than half said they somewhat agreed, with 21 percent saying they strongly or somewhat disagreed. More than two-thirds said the United States government should foot the bill for additional airport security costs.
The survey also measured the importance of various aspects of the travel experience in selecting an airline as well as perceptions of new technologies and developments. For example, two-thirds of respondents strongly or somewhat strongly disagreed with the idea of allowing cell phone use during flights. Roughly 60 percent, however, favored inflight text messaging. Sixty-five percent said they make use of Internet checkin when it is available.
The survey also gauged traveler perceptions of their companies' travel programs. Nearly two-thirds said their travel department is good at keeping travelers informed of potential travel issues. Less than 10 percent responded negatively. Even fewer—7 percent—did not agree that their company's travel arrangers are knowledgeable about corporate policies and procedures. About 70 percent said they easily can access corporate travel policies. Meanwhile, 59 percent said they strongly or somewhat agreed that their corporate program provides the best travel value. Nearly 20 percent disagreed.
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Though consolidating global fulfillment capabilities can unearth several advantages for a corporate travel program, including reduced transaction costs and greater central efficiencies, implementing such a program is fraught with challenges and requires a very organized effort, said a panel of industry executives familiar with the process.
Key concerns include the ability to negotiate with airlines for global pricing, have negotiated fares correctly loaded into global distribution systems and secure a consistent price for a ticket regardless of the destination at which a city pair is booked.
"We needed airlines not to worry about positioning and give us negotiated rates regardless," said Jane Gardner, manager of Americas travel for Cisco Systems, which pioneered a follow-the-sun approach
(BTN, March 7). "Several did."
"Fare-loading is a challenge in a call-center scenario," said John Caldwell, managing director of North American corporate and agency sales for Northwest Airlines. "It's very complex to load every single city pair and currency conversion. Airlines want to segment prices. As we move into global fulfillment, we will have to find a middle ground, so that we save cost and protect market share."
Other potential obstacles include the pronounced differences between North America and foreign countries in both the penetration of online booking and electronic tickets. Agilent Technologies global travel sourcing manager Tim Bone, who also has developed a global fulfillment approach, warned of significant differences in data-aggregation processes and protocol overseas. "The standards vary greatly and there are legal issues," he said. "As a rule, there is generally more respect for the privacy of the individual in other countries. Also, it actually can cost more to centralize, since the expense of managing differences can exceed economies of scale."
Despite the caveats, Gardner recommended exploring global fulfillment. "You can't lose sight of the bigger picture," she said. "There are so many other things gained that drive cost savings."
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"The 2006 hotel negotiating season is going to be challenging for everyone," said Boeing Travel Management Co. hotel program manager Lisa Bliss during a session on hotel negotiating, echoing the sentiment of many buyers at the NBTA conference—which traditionally marks the kick-off to the season. While forecasts suggest higher rates for 2006, many buyers are trying to toe the line with hoteliers. John Lowry, Altria manager of meeting planning and hotel program, said his 2006 rates would not go up by as much as forecasts suggest, instead staying flat or in some markets declining. Christine Chippindale, Choice Hotels International senior director of travel industry sales, said several buyers before the conference asked for an extension of 2005 rates in lieu of a traditional request for proposals process.
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"If you're on the buying side, it's really about data," Mike McMahon, chief procurement officer at Deloitte Services LP, said of hotel negotiating. "The 'you can't manage what you don't measure' adage is true in the world we operate." While buyers at a hotel-program-measurement session concluded that no single data stream is ideal for hotel negotiations, Federated Department Stores manager of corporate travel services Bobbi Huber said she prefers receiving spending data, rather than booked data. "We can see the actual dollars spent, not just what was booked," Huber said of the company's PeopleSoft-based expense reporting tool, which has direct feeds from its corporate charge card vendor.
Managing about $290 million in hotel expenses this year, PricewaterhouseCoopers global travel manager Nicki Leeds said she favors spending data and relies heavily on data from the company's preferred corporate charge card for hotel negotiations. However, without strong utilization the data streams are all but useless, they said, stressing the importance of high penetration of their spending data tools. "The card represents the highest global adoption rate for any data source," Leeds said, noting that roughly 90 percent of worldwide travelers use the corporate card. Huber said the company's online expense reporting tool boasts high adoption throughout the company—making it among the most comprehensive data streams for negotiations. "It shows us consolidated data for employees of all divisions," she said.
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The show broke event records for attendance and exhibitor space sold, and next year's conference is on track to do the same. According to NBTA, more than 5,200 corporate travel professionals, of whom 1,200 were corporate travel buyers, attended the four-day event, and 417 exhibiting companies displayed their wares in the San Diego Convention Center's 102,100 net square feet of exhibition space.