Global Business Travel
Association president and CEO Jim McMullan asked board members Donna Kelliher
of Dominion and Doug Payne of Altour to lead a task force to propose
refinements to the Chapter of the Future plan. The task force will include six travel
buyers and five representatives from suppliers, including a couple of chapter
presidents.
The buyer task force
members are Diane Hammons of Burns & McDonnell Engineering , who also
serves as Kansas City BTA president; Caroline Strachan of AstraZeneca; Doris
Middleton of Energizer; Jeannie Eisenhart of Crowley Maritime Corp.; Michelle
Simmons of Bank of America; and James Sisco of Reed Elsevier. Suppliers named
to the task force include William Bos of Best Western International; Jeremy
Gardner of Accent on Indianapolis, who also is the current Ohio Valley BTA
president; Brad Carr of Enterprise Holdings; Lesley Conzelman of Carlson
Wagonlit Travel; and Bay Area BTA president Gary Murakami, representing MGM
Resorts International..
The task force was
created two weeks after GBTA officials announced that they would delay implementation of the original Chapter of the Future plan, bowing to cost and
timing concerns voiced by chapters.
In a letter posted on
the GBTA website, McMullan wrote: "While the task force gets to work, we
are moving ahead with implementing some parts of the Chapter of the Future
initiative, including plans to migrate all GBTA chapters onto a single chapter
system provider, integrated with the GBTA global platform."
GBTA selected
StarChapter as its online chapter management software provider to allow
"board members to manage meeting registrations, payments, membership
records, public and private communications [and] reporting," according to
GBTA documents. Thirteen chapters already use that software and at least 10
more were in the process of migrating, according to the documents. A guide on
the Chapter of the Future stated that all chapters would be required "to
move from their existing platform to StarChapter at the time their current
technology contracts expire, no later than December 31, 2012."