Craig Bailey
BCD Travel this month appointed 10-year company vet Craig Bailey to serve as president of its North America operations (encompassing the United States and Canada), overseeing "client management, contracts, budgets and relationships with all other regions," according to the travel management company. His role was created in conjunction with promotions for Mike Janssen (now global COO) and John Snyder (now CEO). Bailey most recently had been BCD Travel's senior vice president of the North America Central region and TBiz. He spoke recently with BTN executive editor David Jonas about account management, technology and the TBiz integration. Excerpts follow.
What are your goals?
More than anything, I plan to build on the successes that were laid down by Mike. North America always has been a key driver market for us. Since 2008 close to half of our new sales globally have originated with bids from companies from North America. It's important that we continue to drive new sales growth here. Retention is also the cornerstone of our success. We have enjoyed over 95 percent account retention since BCD Travel was created in 2006. A significant portion of our growth over that period of time has come from customers that elected to not only renew with us, but expand the relationship to other countries. Obviously very high traveler satisfaction has played a key role in our retention success.
As a company, we continue to emphasize talent management. We are working very hard to be the kind of company that nobody wants to leave, and that includes our employees and our clients.
So those are really the top three goals and issues.
On client management, how do you improve the servicing?
A key component of that is equipping our account managers to be more globally minded. Most of our North American accounts have expanded their programs multinationally or globally. It will be important to continue that progression of our account management team to really think not only regionally but also globally, and to be more connected with their colleagues around the world.
Given that most TMCs generally support the same booking tools and most help to integrate various other systems, how much of a differentiator is an agency's technology?
We're first and foremost a travel management company, not a technology company. We look for technology companies to partner with rather than looking to build every new product in-house. In the area of intelligence and analytics, we are investing in solutions that will help us and our customers use data to not just understand the past but predict what will happen next. In the area of our new business intelligence platform, we are working internally to create additional capabilities.
In what ways are client needs changing?
The needs are changing in the area of equipping travelers to make decisions themselves when they are on the road. We launched our TripSource mobile app in the United States and Canada in December. Since then, 82,000 travelers have downloaded the app globally [for the iOS and Android platforms]. Putting the decision-making in the hands of the traveler is key. Engaged travelers make smart decisions. We are going to keep evolving from a B-to-B to a B-to-C mindset. Travelers will get help throughout the trip and have tools when and where they need it. We'll even build in rewards for behaviors that companies want to encourage for their travelers. We'll continue to add capabilities. For now, it's mostly an itinerary management app, but next year we'll be adding the ability to communicate with travelers at the right moment and in just the right way so we can guide them to the most cost-efficient behavior when they are on the road. We are also going to roll out an itinerator that travelers can use to forward non-BCD-booked itineraries into the app so that program managers will have a tool to address that rogue spend. Data will be passed to their security and spend management information systems through that.
On TBiz, has that been fully integrated?
Yes. For the most part, the integration has gone very well and as we expected. After the acquisition, we found that many of the TBiz clients are very loyal to the brand, and we had to demonstrate that the acquisition would be beneficial to them. They appreciate the strengths that we have brought to the table—things like strategic meetings management, sourcing, consulting, benchmarking and international servicing. We just migrated all TBiz customers over to Decision Source, our data and security reporting platform. They have been very impressed with the capabilities relative to the TBiz reporting platform.
The migration of many of the back-office and information and communications technology infrastructure, etc., was all done by the end of last year. It's always a challenging environment but we have successfully migrated all those core systems over, picked them out of Sabre and moved them over here.
It's a two-way street, right? There were things on the TBiz side that you adopted.
We continue to operate them as a separate business unit. There are certain technologies that are inherent in TBiz, such as the mid-office application, that prohibit us from just integrating them totally into BCD. We really don't have any immediate plans to change the way we are operating TBiz. Clients see the value in keeping that brand distinct, and we really appreciate the reputation and technology that TBiz worked so hard to build before we acquired it.
Russ [Howell, BCD Travel executive vice president of global technology] and his team are developing a long-term roadmap to merge some of those systems that right now prohibit us from being able to place some of our BCD technology solutions on the TBiz side, and vice versa. That roadmap really will enable us to offer the best of both worlds.
Are you still prospecting for TBiz business specifically?
We are. We really haven't until recently been out in the marketplace actively selling TBiz. That was really driven by the fact that we were going through so much migration and integration activity, so it really wasn't the right time to start going through implementations at the same time in that environment. But now that we have most of those core migration and integration activities behind us, we're back in the marketplace and starting to sell. In fact, we just closed on a new account that was implemented [last] week.