The 2004 Travel Manager Of The Year: BTN Names Susan Finkbeiner

Business Travel News earlier this month named Susan Finkbeiner, vice president, manager, travel services for Goldman Sachs, as the 2004 Travel Manager of the Year. BTN editors singled out Finkbeiner for the depth and breadth of her innovation and influence that enabled her to push the envelope of several industry practices during the past year. These included overhauling nearly every aspect of a travel program, implementing mandates in a culture that previously had none and blazing trails for travel managers to follow in bulk purchasing airline tickets, allocating hotel rooms and tracking travelers.

Building on a track record of travel management program successes during an era of cost cutting that enabled an internal cultural shift, Finkbeiner used a collaborative approach, including a strong travel team and senior management support, to take her company to new heights of globalization, automation and effectiveness.

Some of these gains were realized through innovative tools that were developed further with Goldman's specifications and assistance during a global agency consolidation. By switching agencies from WorldTravel BTI to American Express last fall and enhancing previous innovations, Goldman's efforts are likely to make it possible for other buyers to get access to such advanced tools.

Much of Goldman's gains were possible not just because of its large $64 million air spending volume, but also because it strengthened its travel policy. In a company that still has trouble saying the word "mandate," Goldman Sachs last year required its travelers to use the lowest-cost preferred carrier, stay at a preferred property and book all simple reservations with its online booking product.

"Almost every single component of the travel program in '03 was changed or impacted in some shape or form," said Tom Harney, vice president of corporate services and Finkbeiner's boss. "Susan's influence was in several areas. Besides the air program and the hotel program, Susan manages the corporate apartment program and the ground transportation program. There have been significant improvements in service and expense management improvements made in those areas too that would add to the inventory of successes.

"One of the reasons we continue to be successful, with well over a 90 percent compliance rate, is that we don't just tell people about the policy," Harney said. "These things are introduced in an organized fashion. Susan has a group of real users who act as a travel liaison group. When we're introducing policy or program changes, Susan meets with these people and there is a dialogue, there's an explanation or a rationale given. People leave with the reasoning, and that helps get the message out to the masses."

"Each of our nine divisions has a group of people who are responsible for travel policy compliance," Finkbeiner explained. "Investment banking, which is our largest individual customer, actually has four or five people who do nothing but policy approvals, and we work very closely with them."

A fundamental component of the changes Finkbeiner led last year was the selection of a travel management company. Goldman Sachs chose American Express in the spring of last year, and completed its implementation on Sept. 29. "We took our call center from a midtown Manhattan location, with agents who had been with our account for five or six years," Finkbeiner said, "to a remote location in Hartford with new agents. We put a lot of time and effort into training and overseeing the transition team. That was our top priority. A lot of other things were critical to us, such as MIS. One of the biggest concerns we had was that our online booking product be up and ready day one. One of the biggest concerns pre-implementation was that if we didn't get that up and running, we were going to have some serious issues getting phones answered."

"There's a savings," Harney pointed out, "primarily from real estate and people-related savings, through the agency transition, which also includes a shift to self-service, which reduces the number of agents. It's hard to tell where one begins and one ends."

The savings came through restructuring, reduced labor costs and competitive agency pricing as a result of the agency RFP. Savings was not the only objective, however. More basic was the need for service excellence.

"You talk about service excellence," Harney said, "even when we went to the mandated, or required, policy, it wasn't done in just a tightening of the belt mode. It was done in a balanced fashion. Susan went to a lot of trouble to work with our primary carrier, American, to get an upgrade policy on specific routes. So there wasn't this blind, 'we're going to save money, and if you don't like it tough.' We also made sure that schedules were working so people could get on the plane without being inordinately inconvenienced."

The lowest-cost preferred carrier policy particularly focused on Goldman's use of American Airlines' AAirpass program. Goldman was the pioneering client of the program, through which the company purchases flight miles in bulk in advance.

"When American Airlines first started the AAirpass program," Finkbeiner said, "I was with American Airlines and I was actually on the selling side of AAirpass to Goldman, and then came to Goldman just as we were implementing it back in 1994. At the time, AAirpass was designed to be an individual program that only the ticketholder could use. For the longest time, American had been reluctant to sell it as a corporate program. They didn't want the entire company to draw from the same bank of miles, so we were very much on the forefront of that. We were the only AAirpass customer for at least two or three years, then they sold a few other accounts, and then they drew it back again. For about a year now, American is back actively marketing it."

While Goldman paid a lot less for AAirpass tickets, it previously focused on offering travelers a choice of two air carriers on every route.

"The big change last year was that, as part of cost savings initiatives, as well as the fact that we had prepurchased the miles and wanted to make sure that we drew them down," Finkbeiner said, "we got senior management to approve the lowest-cost preferred carrier policy. That then drove our adoption up on AAirpass." That substantially reduced the use of the alternate carrier, but first Goldman secured additional enhancements to the AAirpass program.

"We've worked closely with American Airlines on this," Finkbeiner said, "and they have implemented new reporting and a new procedure. In the past, there were no tickets associated with AAirpass, you just checked in with your card and got on the plane. There was a dummy paper ticket that they generated as a receipt.

"A little more than a year ago, American implemented an e-ticketing program for AAirpass, which we worked on with them, because their initial thought was that we would drive a ticket for every AAirpass transaction. That was problematic for us because one of the beauties of AAirpass was that we don't drive a ticket, which saves us administration on the agency side. What's also still a great feature for us is that there are no refunds associated with AAirpass either. So we worked with American when they implemented the e-ticketing procedures, and now we key the reservation off to them and they do the ticketing, which is great. And if our travelers don't fly, the ticket is never used, and we don't draw down the bank of miles."

Goldman also had its accounting people work with American's to establish a separate feed from American Airlines, so as Goldman draws down the miles, accounting services can put that charge onto Goldman's T&E statement on a separate line.

Goldman began requiring that employees stay at preferred hotel properties, even if non-preferred properties are within per diem, "because we got decreases in our rates by reducing the number of our hotels in our program," Finkbeiner said. "To make sure that we were directing the business to the preferred hotels, we got buy-in from the administrators to say, even if it's below per diem, you still need approval to stay outside the program."

By directing the business to specific properties, the company stands to save significantly.

"Just to give you an example, we save about 35 percent just by directing people from hotels to utilize fixed assets," Harney said. "We have 85 or so corporate apartments. As we speak in 2004, we are at almost 95 percent occupancy or utilization of that fixed asset.

"When you look at management of assets and influence, rather than have people stay at deluxe level properties, we are actually using these fixed assets to a great efficiency, which I attribute to Susan's leadership."

Goldman requires the hotels in its program to provide rooms for its hotel room allocation program. These rooms help ensure availability for its travelers and Goldman now has a tool it can use to go online in real time and understand which allocations it has used and which it has remaining at each property. These are allocations of a small number of rooms per property that the hotel holds for Goldman at no charge until the day of arrival, the day before or 72 hours out, depending on the cancellation provision.

"We book the rooms that have the greatest onus or penalty first," Finkbeiner said. "We try to save as many rooms as we can for the last minute. If we haven't given the hotel the name of the traveler by whatever the cancellation period is, the rooms go back into the inventory of the hotel. We work with them, and we will give them back rooms earlier if we see that we don't need them, especially if they need them."

That hotel allocation program began five years ago. "Last year was the first where we were actually looking for contingency rooms again," she said. "Allocations were not as critical in the past couple of years as they were before 2001, when we were running into sold-out situations everywhere."

The requirement that all simple reservations be booked with the online booking product went into effect about one month before the agency conversion. "Previously," Finkbeiner said, "we had product-priced the services so that if you called the agency directly, it was a higher price internally than if you were to book online. We sold it to the divisions on that basis, and actually got our adoption rates up from about 7 percent over several months to 20 percent in about April of last year. It pretty much stuck at 20, until we got the mandate in August for the reservations, and then we immediately shot up to 50, which is where it has stayed since.

"We haven't actively marketed it since then because we have been in the process of converting from Sabre BTS to GetThere. We hope that having Amtrak in there and also actively marketing it once again, we'll get above 50 percent."

Finkbeiner and another colleague came up with the idea for PeopleTracker, which provides real-time traveler information, at least five years ago. "We worked very closely with the travel team and security, along with the project management group and the technology group, to develop this with BTI," she said. "When it started out, it only was in the Americas. We had a front end, so that we here at Goldman could access the system on the Web. The records were dumped in and we could query by flight, destination, etc. We were pretty much global by 9/11. It was not an easy product to develop, and we ran into a lot of roadblocks with it."

Before Goldman converted to American Express, Finkbeiner made it clear that traveler safety was critical. "And that meant real-time data, which at this time is two to three hours old. We pushed the envelope and said that a 24- to 48-hour time lag isn't acceptable."

Finkbeiner also insisted the system be accessible by Goldman globally. American Express told a recent global advisory council meeting this was something it soon would market to other companies.

Finkbeiner said Amex also would offer to other companies an enhanced version of the hotel allocation system that Goldman had developed previously with BTI. "Amex brought in a development team and did a Web-based application that actually is much slicker than what we had," she said. "We're looking for ways to develop that application, and Amex has been very receptive to that because, again, they can market it to other clients. So we asked them to develop a Web-based application for our agency key performance indicators to have global agency KPIs that we can track and access through the Web. We're also looking to develop with them a global customer service database for addressing service issues.

"And this is where we're looking to raise the bar and push them a little bit. We also would like it to be fed directly in. When the agents get the complaint on the front line, there's a script they follow that outlines what the complaint is. When the complaint goes over to the customer service desk, it's manually keyed in."

Another area in which Finkbeiner has pushed the envelope is in exception reporting. "We actually had BTI develop customized exception reports for us when we were with them, and now we are finding out that we have to develop them with American Express," she said. "Neither agency had off-the-shelf products we could use for exception reports that were anywhere near what we wanted. What we want, I don't think, is all that unusual—traveler name, routing flown, what was out of policy, how much it cost the firm and the name of the approver— to me it's just pretty simple. You have to be able to catch that at the point of sale and track that through and then put it into a report at the end. It was a very manual process with WorldTravel. Amex actually has been able to automate some of that process for us."

Finkbeiner said these and other accomplishments, including the completion of global car rental and black car bidding processes, happened through the participation of the global team and "a very solid team" in the Americas, though here too her boss gave her credit.

"It's easy to point to the technical accomplishments," Harney said, "but none of this happens without motivated, well- organized, capable people. Susan did a great job in keeping these people focused."

The U.S. team includes Nicholas Nicoletti, Ed Robisky and Ed Stouter. Nicoletti, vice president of travel services, manages airline programs, has direct oversight for the agency relationship and is the lead person for the online booking system. He is working with Amex to develop PeopleTracker and refine MIS reporting. Robisky, a financial analyst who evolved into Goldman's hotel program manager, recently has conducted reverse online auctions and automated the RFP process. Robisky is working with preferred hotels to develop customized Web pages and has been instrumental in working with American Express to develop the hotel allocation database. Vendor liaison Stouter is Goldman's point person for anything related to policy.