Bill Connors
The National Business Travel Association planned next week to announce its newest major event, scheduled for 15-16 May 2008 in Milan, but The Transnationalmanaged to get some details out of executive director Bill Connors in a Wednesday interview, excerpted here. NBTA officials said the event is not timed to compete with the 18-20 May Washington, DC conference of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, but rather to balance NBTA's conference workload for the year.
We understand you are about to announce a new international event. What can you tell us about that?
For the past couple years, we have been talking about what we can do to have some sort of event in Europe, and we have come up with Milan, May 15-16, 2008. We already have some sponsorship commitments from SkyTeam, Visa and Dav El for that, and we'll be actively selling sponsorships and booth space at [next week's] Boston convention. Fifty-three percent of our members say they manage travel in the United Kingdom. Another 37 percent say they manage in Europe, so it's a piece of the strategy for us to become a more global organization and allow our members to network with other buyers and suppliers from around the world. We're also actively soliciting support, as far as content goes, by setting up a steering committee of buyers and suppliers and trying to involve as many of our friends in Europe as we can.
NBTA's past experience in Europe mostly involved association partnerships, such as the historical cooperation with the Business Travel Association of Germany (VDR) and the more recent work with the Institute of Travel Management in Britain. Is the Milan conference a partnership initiative or is NBTA on its own this time?
We're meeting with the Paragon partners [including business travel associations from around the world] next week at [the Boston] convention, and I'm hoping to involve all sorts of those folks on the steering committee, or in some sort of marketing opportunity for the event. We're all our own entities, but I'm hoping we'll involve all of them. We have invited all of the Paragon folks to send a representative to the steering committee for the content. We may be able to work out some other things, as well. We have good friends there, and don't want to upset those friendships. In the past they have been singular, bilateral partnerships and we're hoping for more multilateral partnerships.
Regarding a more global orientation, NBTA has been sort of acquiring other associations, such as the former Canadian Alliance and the Australasian Business Travel Association--also a Paragon member. When associations "acquire" each other, is that the same sense of acquisition as when companies buy each other?
It's a little different. The ABTA experience was a merger in that their folks agreed to merging with us and rebranding as NBTA Asia Pacific. That said, the current executive director now reports to me. The Canadian one was more of an acquisition because it was not a traditional not-for-profit, so we actually had to buy the company and turn it into a not-for-profit ... and now it's run much like we are run. It varies and is really different in every country, and the semantics of whether it's a merger or acquisition changes.
Are there barriers in certain countries in which you could never own an association?
We haven't run into that, but there are different degrees of governmental regulation you have to go through. Whenever we have done one of these partnerships, we have tried to make sure someone from that country runs the operation in that country. Our Canadian operation is run by Canadians, for Canadians. Similarly in Australia, the Australians run it. We're not going to tell them what to do, but we can certainly provide resources to help them grow.
What prompts these deals and is NBTA trying to do more of them?
We're in a mode of making sure we're in strategic areas around the globe that deal with business travel, including our strong partnership with the Brazilians and some of these other rapidly developing economies. That's why we were in China and Mexico--and we can't ignore the mature markets, either. Clearly, we have become a much more international organization and will continue going down that path. It's just common sense. If you represent 80-something percent of the Fortune100 companies, you can't help but be global.