Terrific NBTA Europe Conference

NBTA Europe, with strong support from Paul Tilstone and the fine ITM staff, put on an excellent conference in Lisbon last week. About 220 delegates attended from all over Europe, plus a few of us from North America.  Topics included:

• Traveler security – lessons learned from the ash cloud
• Alternative strategies for procuring travel
• How to use travel data more strategically
• End-to-end technology (procure to pay) pros and cons
• Impact on buyers from further airline consolidation
• Social media in corporate travel programs
• Merchant fees – the next unbundling?
• And several other topics very relevant to corporate buyers

The networking and knowledge sharing was first-rate.   I’ll write more detailed posts about several of the topics that were covered. My only complaint was that I could not attend every educational session.  Kudos to NBTA Europe for launching an excellent event.  I look forward to seeing more of this high-quality programming in the years to come.

Travel Procurement Workshop at NBTA 2010

Yesterday I led a full-day workshop on travel procurement at NBTA’s annual conference.  We had a terrific group of about fifty folks participate.  About two-thirds came from travel backgrounds, and about a third came from the procurement side.  Lots of good interaction throughout the day.

Here are the slides that I used during the workshop.

Catching Up at NBTA?

If you’re going to NBTA’s Convention in Houston next week, and you’d like to catch up – let me know!  I’ll arrive on Saturday afternoon, and leave on Wednesday afternoon.  No firm plans yet for dinner on Sunday or Monday, but a few of us are thinking about Tex-Mex on one of those nights…if that sounds good, you’re invited – the more, the merrier!

Here are a few things I’m planning to check out at the Trade Show:

Blogging from the Masters Program

Today and tomorrow I’ll give you my take on the topics covered here at the Masters Program in Washington, D.C.  This is a small invitation-only event that gets attended by a fairly senior crowd in the business travel industry.

If you’d like to tee up a question on any of the topics, please leave a comment here at the bottom of this post.  I’ll do my best to bring it up, either here at the event or afterwards with the relevant speaker.

The full agenda is here; the key topics include:

Go to Some Good Conferences!

No question, I’m a fan of education and networking in the travel industry.  It’s hard to beat the value we get from the better conferences out there.  If you’re looking to improve your travel, meetings or procurement practices, then you should definitely attend some of these industry-oriented events.  Here are two that I’m attending in the next few weeks: