BTN Recognizes Lichtenstein

Business Travel News last month named Cisco Systems director of travel, meetings and events Susan Lichtenstein the 2009 Travel Manager of the Year.

In two years, Lichtenstein has overseen a consolidation of Cisco's hotel program to six chains with multiyear contracts and dynamic pricing to simplify negotiating efforts, tighter controls and collaboration in its meetings program, a restructuring of its airline suppliers and a consolidation to three call centers worldwide.

Lichtenstein and her team also enhanced booking and social networking technology to ensure compliance, which earned her a BTN Best Practitioner nod in 2008.

BTN editor-in-chief David Meyer, in presenting the award during a ceremony on the roof of San Diego's Ivy Hotel, said Lichtenstein "in only two years' time has significantly transformed the company's travel program by making innovative moves in contracting and structuring air, hotel, meetings and agency services" and that she "combined both industry knowledge and innovative thinking to come up with new ways to improve how industry processes are structured."

Cisco previously followed the traditional pattern for a hotel program: annual requests for proposals and negotiations. The problem with that pattern, however, was that Cisco's travel needs changed much more than once a year, said Jane Gardner, Cisco's senior manager of global travel.

"We're constantly adding new customers and have new areas where our travelers need to go," she said. "With the old format, we had to put people into nonpreferred hotels whenever we had a new site."

For this year's program, instead of talking to 50 or more different hoteliers, Cisco instead negotiated with six strategic, multibrand hotel companies, which encompass the three key tiers it needed for business travel, and was able to get a commitment of 85 percent of the hotels within each chain, Lichtenstein said. The agreements contained a hybrid of fixed negotiated rates and a dynamic pricing component to keep up with market conditions. While other travel managers faced constant renegotiations to keep up with falling hotel rates this year, Lichtenstein and her team instead could concentrate on improving traveler experiences, she said. Lichtenstein also locked in the agreements for three years to avoid having to repeat the arduous RFP process every year.

By simplifying the partner strategy, Cisco has been able to increase the number of properties available to its travelers, said Carlos Almendros, Cisco's senior manager of processes and technology, and hotel compliance has increased from 60 percent to 85 percent. "Instead of a static listing of hotels, like we've had in the past, it's opened up the opportunity to widen the number of hotels within this strategic group, improving the availability in cities we maybe didn't have before," he said.

Hotels initially were resistant to the agreement structure but eventually realized the benefit to both sides, Lichtenstein said, and now are more open to duplicating the agreement strategy with other corporate clients.

"We have other customers calling and asking how we did this, and hotels at board meetings are kind of cloning what we're doing," Lichtenstein said. "It's a better way to do business."

Cisco also took a different approach to its airline agreements under Lichtenstein's leadership. The team negotiated with airlines outside of the traditional alliance structures and instead partnered with airlines to create what she called the "Cisco world alliance."

The company also has consolidated its call centers in 91 countries to three: in Bangalore, India; the United Kingdom and North Carolina, Gardner said. About 85 percent of Cisco's travel spending goes through those call centers, she said.

This, however, also required some innovation with airline negotiations, according to Gardner. The team persuaded airlines to move to a point-of-origin ticketing rather than a point-of-sale stance, so an employee in Germany could get the appropriate discount even if booking through the United Kingdom office, she said.

"The airlines had a difficult time, because point of sale is their comfort zone," Gardner said. "Some bought into it wholeheartedly, some bought into it because Cisco was asking and some are still having a hard time coming to grips with it, but they're learning to think differently about how they do business."

Cisco also is in the process of a complete globalization of its meetings program. The company is aligning teams, getting vendor agreements in place and rolling out an American Express meeting card, said Carolyn Pund, Cisco senior manger for meetings and events, noting Cisco already has cleared the biggest obstacle.

Executives already have bought into the globalization project, which could not have been done without collaborating with the events and marketing team, Pund said. Often, travel/finance and events/marketing are at odds: The travel/finance team views events/marketing as a group that will spend money loosely, while events/marketing views travel/finance as a group that wants to control events without understanding their importance, she said. At Cisco, however, the two teams now work in tandem, an example more companies are looking to follow.

"This economy has driven everybody to do cost savings, so while we've been pushing it at Cisco, it's come even more to the forefront," Pund said. "It was many months and a lot of collaboration, but today, the travel team is one of our strongest allies and partners."

Through all these efforts, technology remains the key to making it all work, Lichtenstein said. Her BTN Best Practitioner honors last year came through her efforts to inform and engage travelers through social networking platforms as well as online booking tool enhancements that direct users to alternatives when booking travel. Those tools continue to prosper, Almendros said, and internal meeting travel is down significantly as a result.

The team has added tools to inform travelers of emissions and carbon footprint when booking travel and a tool for managers to track their own team's policy adherence, he said. "This has helped raise the visibility and educate the enterprise on driving costs down so travelers book within policy and stay with preferred partners," Almendros said.

Lichtenstein said her approach to travel management has never been to focus solely on the needs of her company or react to current market conditions, such as whether it's a buyer's or seller's market. Instead, she said the key has been to develop a program that's successful in any market and to improve the experience for suppliers, the various departments within her company and her travel management peers.