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Article Excerpt
BUSINESS TRAVEL NEWS NAMES THE 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL EXECUTIVES OF 2006
Business Travel News editors once again have named the 25 decision makers they perceived as having exerted the greatest sway over the business travel industry in the previous year. Editors vetted nominations from industry professionals, including members of the Business Travel News editorial board.
Descriptions of these executives' decisions and influence provide a rich understanding of the most significant changes in corporate travel last year.
This is Loews chairman and industry leader Jonathan Tisch's sixth appearance on our annual list and the fourth for Northwest vice president Al Lenza and Concur CEO Steve Singh. Singh was one of four executives to return to the list from the year before, in addition to two three-timers, US Airways CEO Doug Parker and Hogg Robinson CEO David Radcliffe, and two-timer Richard Wooten, Lockheed Martin travel buyer. This is also the third appearance for Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.) and the second for TRX CEO Trip Davis, Concur VP Tom DePasquale, BCD Holdings chairman John Fentener van Vlissingen and American Express senior vice president Andrew Winterton.
MICHAEL BOULT
CEO
StarCite
Michael Boult began 2006 as the new CEO of Philadelphia-based StarCite Inc. and led a charge of aggressive growth and development--promising "more partners and more business from partners, new products and acquisitions." StarCite delivered with a barrage of new initiatives, organic growth, and partnerships and--in August--announced a merger with OnVantage Inc., its biggest rival, creating a clear leader in the meetings technology market.
"When we started the year, this isn't the year we thought we would have," Boult said. "We planned organic growth--and without the merger, it was an outstanding organic growth year. It far surpassed our expectations."
When StarCite hired Boult in mid-2005, founder and then-CEO John Pino praised him as an executive known for leading companies in aggressive growth strategies. StarCite has quadrupled in size since then, Boult said.
The merger--which employs StarCite's name and OnVantage technology--overshadowed other noteworthy developments for the tech company. Chicago-based WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives--now known as BCD Meetings & Incentives--in February announced it would cease offering its own technology tool, Plan2Attend, in favor of the StarCite platform. P2A customers switched to StarCite and WTMI began using StarCite for its own internal meeting management needs.
Site selection giant HelmsBriscoe last February renewed its partnership with StarCite, signing a five-year contract to use the online marketplace for sourcing.
StarCite also announced a new initiative to certify reseller partners and to segment its supplier partners into three groups: certified resellers, strategic business partners--which do not resell StarCite tools--and partnerships with other technology companies to foster development.
In May, StarCite said it had processed the one-millionth request for proposals to pass through its online marketplace. At the end of the third quarter, the company claimed StarCite and OnVantage combined were providing $19 million in lead opportunities to hotels on a daily basis, up 40 percent year over year.
The company also began offering clients a budget-forecasting tool that compares the potential costs of holding a meeting in different locations.
RICHARD BRANSON
Chairman
Virgin Atlantic
Virgin Atlantic chairman Richard Branson this fall put his money where his mouth was when he called on the transportation industry to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. He not only proposed initiatives to slash greenhouse gases by up to 25 percent if adopted, but pledged to invest the earnings from his transportation businesses, including Virgin Atlantic, in businesses that develop renewable energy--with plans to put $3 billion into the initiative during the next decade.
While others have sought and pursued ways to use less fuel, Virgin Atlantic COO Lyell Strambi said this initiative is "unique in making a mea culpa statement about the industry's contribution to the problem despite its social benefits."
In a letter to airlines, aircraft manufacturers and airport operators, Branson said aviation creates around 2 percent of global C[O.sub.2] emissions. "We need to accelerate the pace at which we reduce aviation's impact on the environment," he wrote.
Among his recommendations, Branson suggested creating new airport infrastructure to reduce fuel bum before takeoff and after landing. He proposed "starting grids," to which commercial airplanes would be taxied--engines off--before takeoff, only to start their engines about 10 minutes before takeoff. "This would substantially reduce the amount of time aircraft need to taxi with their engines running and the time spent queuing before takeoff."
Virgin began running trials to show the benefits of starting grids at the end of the year, with U.K. airport operator BAA testing a single flight before ramping up for a bigger trial early in 2007, Strambi said. He said, "Richard had the original vision and sparked the challenge. From there, it has been a team effort. The pilots have come up with excellent ideas. Chief pilot Dave Kistruck and pilot Steve Ford have been talking to Los Angeles and San Francisco airport authorities and getting buy-in for the starting-grid trials. We don't care who does the trial; we are talking to everybody. If anybody is interested in briefings, we'll brief them, whether we fly there or not."
Virgin's government affairs staff is working with others to create industry bodies for cohesive action. In the United Kingdom, they are working with the Sustainable Aviation Group, "trying to put a fire under it," Strambi said. "We need to get suppliers to make it a priority."
Branson encouraged airlines to reduce the weight of aircraft, which in turn would reduce the amount of fuel needed to fly and also touted the "continuous descent approach," through which aircraft begin descent at a higher altitude, moving groundward steadily, as opposed to a staggered approach that bums excessive fuel. James May, Air Transport Association president and CEO, said many domestic carriers already have adopted continuous descent approaches, "which have the potential to significantly reduce noise, fuel burn and emissions on every landing." He said U.S. carriers have improved average fuel efficiency by 44 percent since 1990, but still have room for improvement.
Branson suggested there is a greater level of efficiency in the U.S. air traffic control system and called on Europe to singularize its air traffic control organizations, painting the current system as a "mess of European air traffic control" that "is punishing the environment, with 35 different air traffic control organizations, compared with just one in America."
Branson said that plan would "optimize air routings by aircraft and improve environmental performance further."
MONTIE BREWER
CEO
Air Canada
As U.S.-based carriers last year were coming to new long-term agreements with global distribution systems, the dominant carrier north of the border asserted its growing GDS independence with a variety of initiatives that drive more bookings through its own channels.
Under CEO Montie Brewer's direction, Air Canada pulled some content from the GDS, offered its best corporate deals exclusively through its Web site, then created new unbundled fare types that only could be purchased through Air Canada.
In doing so, the carrier last year changed the way many of its customers book air travel, prompted GDSs to look at modifications to their systems, spurred some Canadian TMCs to develop workaround solutions and sparked an industry-wide dialogue on content fragmentation.
"For us, it's as much about how do I get my GDS costs down, as how do we get a product that meets our customers' needs," Brewer said.
While Brewer credits his team for executing Air Canada's unique offerings, the strategy to go direct came directly from the top and toward the end of last year yielded upwards of 70 percent penetration of Canadian bookings through its own channels, mainly aircanada.com and its own call center.
The carrier's strategy has alienated some corporate clients, who said Air Canada's attempts at GDS independence were at odds with their own travel management goals. Unsurprisingly, Air Canada also irked the distributors it aggressively began bypassing.
The carrier's first strike against third-party travel distributors came last May when it removed certain fare categories from GDS channels, shifting the bookings of lower-bucket Tango fares to its Web site. The move resulted in punitive measures by GDSs and a mounting wave of disgruntled Canadian travel buyers.
Brewer asserted that limitations in GDS technology spurred the carrier to move the bookings to direct channels, as their technology did not support Air Canada's desire to unbundle and create new fare types.
While Tango fare changes affected the leisure market more than corporate clients, Air Canada brought its GDS independence to the managed travel market by offering its best negotiated rates through prepaid flight passes--only redeemable through the carrier's Web site.
The move gained the support of Canadian telecom giant Telus, which touted the program's cost savings, but other travel buyers who said they were being pushed into the program griped that air passes required travelers to bypass corporate-approved booking tools and, instead, log on to aircanada.com.
With Air Canada's November move to unbundle fare options, the carrier once again cited limitations in the GDS model.
The carrier began unbundling flight options through its Web site, allowing travelers to customize bookings by "buying added services or, conversely, to save money by declining benefits normally included in their selected fare type."
Air Canada's newly unbundled flight options--which vary by fare category--only are available through its Web site. Some examples of add-ons that travelers can select at the time of booking include lounge access for upper-class customers for C$25 (US$22.35); seat selection for some customers for $15; $5 inflight meal vouchers for lower-bucket customers; a $5 reduction for some travelers who do not check bags; and a $3 savings for turning down frequent flyer miles.
"This is not a GDS strategy. What it is, we can't live to be a commodity," Brewer said. "So we changed the way we price our product to allow customers to choose different fare types and the customers love it. It doesn't fit for the GDS distribution chain yet. They haven't adapted the way we want them to adapt, but the customers like the product enough to go around the GDS and get what they want."
SHERI CARLSEN
Senior Vice President of Transportation
American Council for International Studies
The impact of Sheri Carlsen's successful pursuit of previously unavailable quarterly multinational settlement reports from American Express not only positively affected her former company, Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp.--which saved about $2 million in transaction fees in 2005 due to the efforts of former director of global travel services Carlsen--but also pushed Amex to make those reports available to other multinational clients.
Carlsen's efforts were spurred by a lack of detailed data on the relationship between service fees and transaction data in several of the 52 countries in which EMC conducted operations, and were capped with a six-month Six Sigma project that led to the development with American Express of a template of key metrics, including air sales, total transactions, operating expenses and fees.
"It was new territory for both of us," said Carlsen last week, speaking from the offices of the American Council for International Studies, a firm that manages educational travel for teachers and students, which she joined in November 2006. "American Express was very open to it."...
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