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Article Excerpt
Download BTN's listing of The 25 Most Influential Executives of the Business Travel Industry of 2007 here.
Business Travel News editors again proudly recognize the 25 business and government executives whose decisions held the greatest sway over the business travel industry in the previous year. Editors vetted nominations that were submitted by industry professionals, including members of the BTN editorial board and staff.
The accomplishments and influence of these executives tells the story of the most significant changes in corporate travel last year. This list, more than most, it seems, features integrators who have bypassed roadblocks. It also contains innovators, growth leaders and proponents of agreements that opened areas of competition or advanced industry consolidation.
Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-MaktoumChairman and CEO, Emirates Airline and GroupPresident, Dubai Civil Aviation AuthorityChairman, Dubai AirportsDeputy Chairman, Dubai Executive CouncilSenior Vice President of Transportation, American Council for International Studies
The new growth leaders in aviation hail from the Persian Gulf states of the Middle East. Etihad, the airline of Abu Dhabi, launched in 2004 but already has 34 aircraft and 22 on order. Qatar Airways has more than 100 aircraft on order. Dwarfing even these impressive numbers is Emirates, the airline of Dubai. Its fleet is 113 strong, serving 62 countries, but it has 244 more aircraft on order, worth $60 billion. Some analysts expect it to become the world's largest carrier by 2015.
To accommodate the growth, $40 billion of airport improvements are underway in the Gulf, with Dubai again heading the list. It plans to open the first phase of the six-runway Dubai World Central in the next 12 months. Eventually, it will be able to handle 120 million passengers per year.
Emirates is winning point-to-point traffic, with Dubai attracting 15 million visitors in the first nine months of 2007 alone, up 17 percent from the previous year. BCD Travel reckons Dubai is its fastest-growing business travel destination, alongside Moscow.
Even more important is the airline's transfer traffic, which, for example, accounts for 78 percent of its seats out of London. "The geographic positions of Dubai and the Middle East as a whole enable them to act as a crossroads for passenger and cargo flows across the globe," said Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, the man who has engineered this bold strategy. "The advent of aircraft that can fly distances of up to 8,000 miles could now make it possible to connect any two cities in the globe with just one stop in Dubai."
In the past year, Emirates launched routes to destinations including Houston, Toronto and Sao Paulo as well as decidedly tertiary cities, such as Newcastle in the United Kingdom and Ahmedabad in India. "Dubai is incredibly well-placed. It is changing the fragmentation of traffic flows," said independent aviation analyst Chris Tarry.
Also well placed to effect such a transformation is the U.S. and U.K.-educated Sheikh Ahmed. Not only has he been the hands-on chief executive of Emirates since its launch in 1985, he also runs Dubai's civil aviation authority and the airport. He also is the uncle of the emirate's ruler, and brother and son respectively of its two previous rulers. He even has a stake in travel management, because Emirates owns HRG affiliate Dnata, one of the largest travel agencies in the Middle East.
Some critics question the level of cross-subsidization between Emirates and the oil revenues of the state it serves, and whether growth can be sustained. For the time being, however, from telling Boeing and Airbus how it would like them to design their aircraft to rerouting global air traffic through his desert state of just 1.4 million inhabitants, Sheikh Ahmed has emerged as one of the most powerful players in aviation.
Jack BlumensteinCEO, Aircell
Inflight connectivity vendor Aircell last year rolled out much of its air-to-ground network, bulked up its staff and signed American Airlines and Virgin America to be among the first domestic airlines to bring inflight Internet to the transcontinental market. Aircell's efforts followed several false starts in bringing inflight connectivity, most notably the failed Connexion by Boeing, shelved in 2006.
CEO Jack Blumenstein said the company is offering an inflight Internet option that is cheaper, quicker to install and lighter in weight than Connexion, building a case that airlines are buying.
"The lesson from Connexion is that passengers loved it," Blumenstein said, "but behind the curtain, it was upwards of 800-plus pounds of equipment, with an antenna on top of the aircraft about the size of a surfboard, which took a significant amount of time to install. Also, those systems relied on acquiring capacity from satellite operators, which is a scarce commodity, much like oil. That translated into a system that was very expensive--about a million bucks a copy per plane. The cost to deliver the service meant a high cost to the passenger. We took a look at that and tried to crack the code." Blumenstein said Aircell developed a system that could be installed overnight at the airport, while costing less than $100,000 for a widebody plane and weighing less than 125 pounds per aircraft.
Blumenstein said Aircell began as a business plan sketched on a cocktail napkin by founder Jimmy Ray in 1991. The initial idea for improved communications devices for pilots and private jets expanded into the commercial travel market after the company purchased a broadband license and 3 MHz of spectrum in a Federal Communications Commission auction in 2006. Since then, Aircell has built its network throughout the United States, while bulking up its headcount from about 45 employees to "well over 200 employees," Blumenstein said.
American Airlines last month said it wired the first of 15 aircraft with Internet capabilities, paving the way to install the offering on most of its transcontinental fleet by this summer. Virgin America also is gearing up to integrate Aircell's offering with its inflight entertainment system and offer it for passengers' laptops and handheld devices. Blumenstein expects the startup carrier to roll it out fleetwide this year.
Blumenstein anticipates other domestic carriers will bring Aircell's Internet access onboard, and expects at least two more agreements this year. "The list of airlines that aren't in the request-for-proposals stage is much shorter than the airlines that are," Blumenstein said.
Meanwhile, competitor Row 44 has gained such carriers as Alaska Airlines and Southwest Airlines to test inflight Internet access through satellite-based connectivity later this year, further making the availability of domestic inflight connectivity a reality.
"By the end of this year, the lives of passengers will have changed forever, and that's happening right in front of us," Blumenstein said.
Michael BoultPresident and CEO, StarCite
StarCite president and CEO Michael Boult led the way last year in establishing new partnerships with American Express, hotel distribution provider Pegasus Solutions and Orbitz for Business to expand the company's reach in the corporate travel market
Boult also led the Philadelphia-based organization to provide customers with benchmarking data and to continue the integration process with former competitor OnVantage.
The agreement with Pegasus allows StarCite customers to access real-time hotel rates through Pegasus' switch and StarCite's platform. Teaming up with Amex for an integrated payment system for meetings allowed the automatic uploading of customer card spending into StarCite's platform and display actual expenses alongside expected expenses. These partnerships were intended to extend StarCite's product offerings.
"It wasn't good enough for us to have one steady product that would be a year old by the time it was introduced to the market. We said that we would need to add new capability and we've done that with the American Express commercial card and Pegasus Solutions," Boult said.
StarCite also launched a benchmarking initiative to survey companies and score the level of maturation of their meetings management programs and how they compare to other companies in their segments.
StarCite's merger with OnVantage--which brought OnVantage's technology under StarCite's name--was completed on Dec. 29, 2006. While the company has "had a full year of moving forward, bringing the companies together--the products, the processes, the people," they are still "working on a lot of product integration activity" and hope to move customers to one platform within the next three to four months, Boult said.
The company also did an "extreme makeover" on its management team, he said, with eight new hires, mostly from outside the travel and meetings industry, to provide "a fresh perspective."
"2007 has been a year of exploration and incremental improvement," he said, adding that 2008 will be less about new products and "more about the execution of what we've built."
Tim BurkeDirector of the Office of Travel and Transportation Services, U.S. General Services Administration
By fully automating and integrating the entire travel reservation and reimbursement process on one Web-enabled platform, the U.S. General Services Administration has given corporate buyers and vendors a model for the long-sought end-to-end solution.
Last year, Tim Burke, GSA director of the office of travel and transportation services, oversaw the rollout of...
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