The Association of Corporate Travel Executives this month will inaugurate its new officers and complete the reorganization of its board of governors from a 40-member body to 14 members.
Five new representatives will join president-elect Cheryl Hutchinson, who recently resigned as corporate travel manager for American Management Systems, and vice president-elect Mark Williams, PricewaterhouseCoopers head of North American travel and meetings, when they take office at ACTE's Global Conference in Montreal April 28-30.
Hutchinson will replace Ron Wagner of WorldTravel BTI who will become chairman.
Elected to three at-large seats on the board were Marilyn Clifton, corporate travel manager EMEA for Oracle Corp.; Cindy Heston, manager of corporate travel worldwide for Thomson Multimedia Inc.; and Angela Naegele, director of global procurement for AT&T's travel. Clifton has served for two years on the ACTE board of governors as well as on the ACTE strategic direction team and the ACTE membership committee.
Elected to serve as the board's EMEA representative was Derek Jewson, managing director of Odyssey Management Services. Skip Thompson, director of national corporate sales at Continental Airlines, was elected to be the board's new U.S. representative.
The five winners of the February 2002 board election were chosen by the Alexandria, Va.-based ACTE's membership of 2,426 corporate travel managers out of a field of 36 travel industry executives who ran for the empty seats.
ACTE's new streamlined board is proportional to the number of ACTE members in the organization's four subdivisions of Canada, the United States, Europe/Middle East/ Africa and Asia/Pacific, said Ian Epps, chairman of the ACTE nominating committee. The new structure features one representative from each of ACTE's four regions, and nine at-large seats that may represent any of the regions.
Epps said the ACTE board made the decision to reduce its size two years ago because of a consensus that the steering organization was too unwieldy. "As board members' terms expired, we simply eliminated their seats," he said. "Gradually, the number of seats on the board decreased, until we reached the level we're at today."
Epps said the smaller board would be more effective as a steering mechanism for the association.
"A lot of things are decided by the ACTE board, including how to handle our budget, the criteria for membership and what programs to offer our members," Epps said. "Our new, smaller board will be more responsive to our members, and will act more quickly and decisively."