2-Minute Survey: Travel Program Priorities

Folks, here’s a super-quick 3-question survey about travel program priorities.

Travel Program Priorities Survey 

If you are a travel buyer, please weigh in…it will take less than 2 minutes, and you’ll shed some important light on this issue. 3 questions, 2 minutes – it’s easy!

This is an anonymous survey – you couldn’t leave your name even if you wanted to. It’s also unscientific, but I think the results will still be very interesting.

If you’re not  a buyer, you probably know a bunch of these fine folks, so feel free to forward this to them. (That’s also meant to be a nice way of asking you non-travel buyers to not take the survey).

I’ll share the results here on this blog, and on stage at the Business Travel Intelligence Summit on May 22nd in New York. If you haven’t heard of this one-day deep dive into the real value of travel data, have a look at the agenda here.   It’s the first event I’ve seen designed specifically to discuss travel data, and it already has over 100 buyers registered to attend.

I hope to see many of you there!

 

Airline Sourcing One-Day Workshops

Any travel buyer interested in learning the most powerful and innovative methods for sourcing airlines should attend one of my workshops:

Airline Sourcing, Nov. 14th in Chicago

Airline Sourcing, Dec. 10th in Dallas

I’ll cover the basics, but then quickly head into deeper water – where buyers will learn how to maximize their leverage, regardless of their air spend. Key topics include:

• Scenario modeling
• Risk-reward mapping
• Why discount benchmarking is useless, and what’s better
• Discovering the gap between the offered and maximum rational discount
• Finding the 20% of your markets that will drive 80% of your savings
• Optimizing between trip cost and trip friction
• Predicting the impact of the AA-US merger on your 2014 air budget
• Procurement’s best and worst roles

These workshops are open to anyone, including airline sales managers.  Register via the GBTA website.

Everyone benefits from having a sophisticated, fact-based discussion about optimizing airline discounts. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

Travel Data and Airline Sourcing Education Decks

You gotta love the 40 good folks who gave up a beautiful Sunday in San Diego to talk travel data.  I delivered a 6-hour workshop for GBTA on this topic, and am proud to report that not one person fell asleep!  Here’s the handout file we used. Topics included:

• Sources and uses of travel data
• Boring data reports and stupid statistics
• Making good data-driven presentations
• Key concepts needed for travel analyses
• Using derivative data to answer seven key questions
• GBTA’s KPI Resource document (as a handout; we didn’t have time to discuss it)

Learn, Network and Vote at GBTA’s Convention

GBTA’s annual convention (Aug. 4-7 in San Diego) offers great opportunities to learn about the corporate travel industry, network with peers and vote on the future of GBTA.

I’m teaching this travel data workshop on Sunday, Aug. 4th from 9am to about 3pm, and this advanced airline sourcing session on Wednesday, August 7th at 11:45am.  On Monday the 5th at 9am Evan Konwiser and I will present on The End and Future of Managed Travel.

Managed Travel 2.0 has come a long way since Evan and I presented the concept at GBTA’s 2012 convention.  We’ll bring fresh and surprising views from

Managed Travel 2.0 – Explanation and Implications

What do chickens and travelers have in common?  Both might be better off without fences.

That’s one of the issues I raised today at The Beat Live’s closing speech.  This speech covered

• The driving forces behind Managed Travel 2.0 and its five key principles
• The three requirements for this concept to take off
• And most intriguingly, several key implications for the major stakeholders in the travel industry.

Here’s the full presentation.  It’s a much deeper presentation than what Evan Konwiser and I covered in Boston at GBTA.  Like that presentation, this one is in ballroom style (pretty pictures, few words), so it loses some punch without the voice-over.   We’ll push out a series of posts to put these pictures into context.

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GBTA Prezos: Hit 1 Home Run, Struck 2 Nerves

Evan Konwiser and I presented the “Managed Travel 2.0” session at GBTA’s Global Convention last month.  The presentation was well received – lots of good discussion in the session, and after, about the implications of this form of travel management.

Here’s the deck we used, and here’s a good recap of the Managed Travel 2.0 session.  Look for a few more posts in the near future about some of the key points we made.

The next day I presented “Innovation in Travel”.  As promised, I took a critical view of the innovative track record in our industry.  Those views weren’t fully appreciated by some in the audience, predictably from the TMC and GDS camps.

Fair enough.  Innovation is to some extent a matter of opinion.  Here’s the deck I used to stir the innovation flames a bit. Thanks much to GBTA for the opportunity to speak about these important issues.

If you attended either session, what did you think?

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From Friction to Fire at GBTA

The sparks are flying.

No, not about GBTA’s IP policies – we got that resolved a couple of weeks ago.  Thanks to all who weighed in on that – GBTA leadership heard you loud and clear.

This is much, much bigger.  It’s the issue of how to manage travel in modern times.

Evan Konwiser and I will fan the flames at GBTA’s Convention in Boston. We’ll present some pretty provocative views on this.  We’re backing it up with evidence, and laying out a direction that has big implications for buyers and suppliers.

Come add your fuel to the fire – join our session on Monday, July 23rd at 9:00 am.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of the sparks we’re throwing out there:

Traveler welfare trumps travel policies

Savings is the wrong goal

Revolution or Evolution – your choice

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GBTA’s Problematic IP Policy

GBTA has implemented a strong – and fundamentally wrong –  intellectual property (IP) policy. I’m raising the issue here to ask your help in getting GBTA back on track.  I’ve run out of patience trying to do this on my own.

GBTA’s  new IP policy affects anyone who:

• Speaks at a GBTA event
• Contributes to a GBTA committee
• Provides volunteer services to GBTA

In short, it affects many of the people reading this blog.

Problems for Presenters: GBTA’s policy, read literally, gives GBTA broad license rights in any intellectual property a GBTA presenter has ever created – whether for GBTA or any other party.  This is no ordinary speaker release form.  The language is surprisingly and needlessly broad.

Problems for Committee Members and other Contributors: It gets worse.  GBTA’s new policy requires you to transfer – as in give away – all your rights to whatever IP you may develop for or contribute to GBTA – and potentially all your other IP you’ve ever created.

On The Road to Education

There likely won’t be any new posts here for the next two weeks, as I’ll be busy delivering travel procurement training in Asia and the U.S. For those interested in the topic, here’s where I’ll be:

17 May near Denver for the Hotel Sourcing Workshop, sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Business Travel Association

23-24 May in Singapore, 26-27 May in Manila, and 30-31 May in Hong Kong to deliver a two-day course on travel procurement principles and travel program globalization. This is an invitation-only course sponsored by Amadeus and Carlson Wagonlit, with support from the Global Business Travel Association.

8 June in Chicago for a one-day workshop on travel procurement sponsored by the Chicago Business Travel Association and GBTA

Then a nice break at home before going to Indianapolis on 23 June for a speech at the Ohio Valley Business Travel Association meeting. I’ll cover the topic of selling into procurement – a challenge that most travel suppliers are facing.

I hope to see some of you at some of these events.  If you’d like to meet before or after, drop me a note!

Bom Dia, Brazil!

Travel truly is priceless.  How else can you get such a clear view of places, of people?  I’m back from the LACCTE travel conference in Sao Paulo with fresh understandings about managed travel in Latin America Brazil – and implications for us Norte Americanos.

Lesson Number One – don’t confuse Brazil and “Latin America”.  One is a country, the other