Travel Manager Salary & Attitude Survey: Managing Travel's Evolution

Business Travel News: In your experience, how has the role of travel manager changed in the past few years?

Tamara Jones: I've only been in the travel industry about five years. I feel like the role has not changed significantly in that time, although it has changed.

I believe that when I first came in, we were getting to be more supplier-focused, with a little bit of talk about metrics management and more rigorous supplier management: more supplier scorecarding, maybe less about who you know and what you know and what industry you worked in before than really managing our suppliers by their rates, by their performance, by what makes sense when managing the numbers—understanding your citypairs, understanding your markets. Not that that wasn't important before, but I think it's even more critical now. With most companies, the cost focus has made us have to do that more so.

Debbie Gittinger: I'm responsible for the operation of the agency, as well as expense accounting and card management. We've always had a fairly significant focus on the procurement aspect. I really see that there is a lot changing toward customer satisfaction and finding that right balance between cost and productivity. That's where our big focus is. The metrics and the scorecard are really important, but it's also about trying to understand what the true value of the program is. What are those right metrics to measure your program—cost savings or cost avoidance or however you measure. We're really moving toward customer satisfaction and productivity.

BTN: When did that shift start?

Gittinger: I'd say probably in the past three years. I've seen more of a shift in that direction. Not that procurement isn't important, it still has a significant role, but it's a balance.

Caro Cook: I'm responsible for the travel program and also for the logistics of shipping people around the world. I haven't seen the role change, but what I have seen change is that I think there's a clearer understanding from our management about what value we bring to the organization. Before, it was a role but nobody really took that much notice of it. It's about timing. Since we're going through a lot of change in the organization and we've been able to offer up a significant amount of savings, I think they really recognize the value in what we do.

BTN: When did that recognition set in?

Cook: I think about 18 months ago.

BTN: Why was that?

Cook: It has to do with the fact that the organization needed to change, so how do we save money? Travel was one of the most obvious things. We've always been putting forward ways we can save money, it just hasn't really been recognized. Nobody wanted to do anything about it, but then they needed to.

Cindy Heston: As far as the evolution in my role, it's gone from starting out in more of a financial role, working with controllers, moving over to sourcing to the degree where it was actually outsourced and I worked with other companies in conjunction with Thomson, to where I was brought back in with human resources. Now I've hit every possible category. Service is important, procurement is important, the financial community is important.

It's similar to what Caro said as far as the value in the organization, since I had kind of gone outside in the procurement role and managed other businesses. When I was brought back into the organization, I was looked upon more as a sourcing-minded person and immediately my credibility within the organization was much higher, to the point to where now it's kind of end-to-end for travel management. I didn't have meetings before, but I do now. I didn't have the corporate card program, but I do now. I didn't have the expense reimbursement tool, but now I do. Getting the card and the tool and even meetings was due more from me pushing it internally, but it's broadened tremendously, and from my perspective, it's in the company's best interest to keep that under one umbrella if possible.

Jones: I too have expense management and corporate card, and I am really being challenged to make sure I've outsourced everything I possibly can. I'm under procurement, which is under finance, so we're feeling the pressure—and I think it's good pressure—from the procurement side, from supplier management, negotiations and contracts, and from the finance side around cost and policy controls and saving the company money.

That next step is making sure we're finding the experts to really do it, and then we only do the supplier management part. I'm focused on the whole outsourcing concept of really making sure we're right-staffed and letting the right people do the work that we need to have done.

Gittinger: We are bringing everything back. I mean, not the agency itself. We're not going to them to make the reservation, but we had outsourced everything about four or five years ago and we had a very bare-bones staff at Procter to help manage the outsourced suppliers. Effective July 1, we're bringing it all back, including all of the sourcing, all of the management of the agencies globally.

What we are not bringing back in-house yet is travel expense accounting. That is still outsourced to a third-party supplier, because that's much more transactional. We've found transactional things work really well with outsourced suppliers, but the things that are touchy-feely, customer-focused, nobody else can do it as well as you can do it. Employees want the company to be able to assist them and make sure their needs are met. That's a big change for us.

BTN: Does that tie into the move toward customer service?

Gittinger: No, we've been doing that for the past three years. Because we started that first, that's where we realized a supplier cannot meet the satisfaction needs of our employees as well. They want to have a Procter person that they talk to and work with.

Over the past couple of years, we've had to put regional managers in place to help facilitate that interaction with our outsourced suppliers, and now we're taking it to the next step with bringing it all back in.

BTN: Rather than using a complaint resolution mechanism—

Gittinger: We will now be the person they come to.

BTN: To what extent will you need to expand your staff?

Gittinger: When we outsourced, we went to too much of an extreme. We went to one person when we outsourced everything and everything else was with a third-party supplier. Over the four years, we put in regional managers in North America, Latin America, Asia and Western Europe. We were at five and we're bringing back nine additional people. For sourcing, we'll be hiring eight people, so we're expanding the organization considerably.

BTN: Even though those resources are dedicated to specific functions, it does give you a team vehicle.

Gittinger: Exactly. You can flow to them the work as needed.

Cook: I don't see my role particularly changing, but I see what I manage changing in the sense that we're trying to find the balance. We're in between the two of you in that we have to get rid of some functions where we're not adding value, so we've got to look at everything we're doing critically: Should we be doing it, does it add value and are we doing functions that should really be in HR, as some of our stuff is? We need to do some realignment as well.

Jones: Don't you think that, having the policy controls in place, you're going to need more people to help manage that shift, initially?

Cook: Managing the policy is done through technology, so I don't see that it's going to up the number of people. Certainly, our reporting needs to be better, but again once we get that set, it will be handled through the technology.

Heston: My experience is very much like Procter's. It's like we were at one end of the spectrum and now we're at the other. When I came back in human resources, it was really a big statement from a company standpoint. They recognized the people aspect of travel. I feel like now it's more of a holistic way to manage it. We also added staff. I have a business travel analyst who works for me who really mines the data on the expense reimbursement tool. At this point, the balance is right to really put an effective program in place.

BTN: How does reporting to human resources change the nature of the program, or does it?

Heston: I report to the highest level of HR, and it was by design, so that there was a level of protection within the organization for this role so that it wouldn't be dictated by one or two different business units or one or two different specific areas, whether it be sourcing or finance or whatever. It's like you work for the group as a shared service. You're responsible for all levels, all layers, not just a procurement-minded or a financial-minded community.

It was our internal auditors who did a corporate audit and said, "Not only do we recommend that you bring this position back in, but we recommend you put it in a safe haven almost to make sure that other businesses don't try to monopolize it." It's more of a balance as far as making sure that you've got servicing the employee first in your mind before you look at cost savings or make sure that balance matches.

Gittinger: I think most companies have always had a difficult time trying to figure out where travel belongs. We've been down the procurement route and the finance route and the human resources route, and now that we've got these business services and global business services and we're part of employee services, it's a lot easier because all of the central services are within one umbrella, and it's much easier to go out and market your program.

BTN: You're in an unusual situation, Tamara, having both travel and card. Most travel buyers don't have card, as it's in accounts payable or some other unit.

Jones: I'm partnered with them. Accounts payable is part of my team, but we're kind of weird in that accounts payable is actually under procurement and then under finance. We seem to have a weird organization when we benchmark.

Heston: If you want to be strategic, you have to have that and you have to have the expense payment. You can certainly have trending and see signs of where things are going with travel management company data, but you really have no clue about what's going on until you get to the expense data.

Jones: That was a surprise for me. I fought that marriage and thought, no way, there's no value. I need to be a partner, but I didn't need to necessarily oversee it. But once we made that marriage, it was amazing the synergies that we could create.

Probably about two and a half years ago, finance kind of took procurement over and married corporate card, expense management and travel. For me, it was like this light bulb: How did I fight this? I just had so much more influencing power and ability to shoot 60,000 feet over what was happening in our organization. I thought I could see a lot, but I only saw a small piece. To be able to have both travel and expense management data at my fingertips is so powerful.

BTN: Is travel manager as a full-time job a thing of the past?

Gittinger: Not in our company. In fact, there's more and more visibility. As we commercialize our product, we've got a very a strategic methodology in how we deploy anything and how we communicate, so there's more visibility.

Jones: I would agree. I think that because we're managing policies through the expense management process and declining expenses and challenging them, people know that there's a travel manager, and before they make decisions, they ask the travel manager.

BTN: Are you being asked to do more than just manage travel functions?

Gittinger: Marketing. We're really a marketer now. We're running this as a business. Just as brands have to go out and promote Tide, or whatever it might be, they're expecting us to market our program the same way. That's because we've got a very principle-based policy. We don't have a mandated policy, so as a result we need to pull people in and help them understand the reasons these programs are important.

Heston: I look at it like more as a consultative, internal knowledge expert. We have to look at it very holistically, but then we really have to do some deep data dives to see what's going on in the different business units and help them as much as possible.

Jones: We're doing a lot more data scrubbing, then using that data to influence travelers. You can't just say, "Here's the right thing to do" anymore. It's got to be, "because this is how you're going to get your lower average ticket price."