Interview: Barbara Schulte, Travel Buyer of the Year 2025

When Barbara Schulte joined FIFA in 2023, she inherited a travel programme that was almost entirely reliant on manual processes. There was no online booking tool, no central form of payment and – remarkably for an organisation of its size and scale – no travel management company.

Everything was managed by an in-house team of 22 travel bookers using a “naked Amadeus” interface with BSP invoicing and minimal technology underpinning the function. For Schulte, who had spent years as an outsourced travel manager for the likes of Phillips and Microsoft, the opportunity was immediately clear.

“When I came in, everything was very manual,” she says. “There was no online booking tool, no app, no nothing. So, for someone like me who likes process optimisation, it was a dream because it was really like, OK, there is nothing and now you can build from there.”

Over the next two years, she would architect a wholesale transformation with the introduction of digital booking and payment tools, a formal duty-of-care programme and a hybrid operating model uniquely designed to scale and shift in line with FIFA’s global tournaments.

A travel programme as complex as the game itself

FIFA is the global governing body of football, with 211 member associations. Its travel programme is shaped not only by some 800 ‘core’ employees, but also by tournament staff, delegates, referees, VIPs and event personnel, which can see FIFA’s workforce swell to 5,000 people during peak periods, with around 95 per cent of that population travelling.

Schulte’s team, which now includes the in-house team and 10 outsourced travel managers, is responsible for all transient travel bookings for air, accommodation and ground transport across the organisation. The team also coordinates domestic travel for competing football teams, moving them between basecamps, stadiums and host cities for every match.

"We have four segments of travel that we organise for teams per match. It is very, very complex,” Schulte explains. This includes travel to a designated team basecamp upon arrival in a host country, followed by travel to and from the location/city where the match is played, as well as the final trip to the airport prior to departure.

“And it’s not just the Men’s and Women’s World Cup every four years. We run about 15 tournaments and major events each year. There are employees, guests, football teams, officials and sponsors, and they are often all moving at the same time.” This includes the annual FIFA Congress, which involves more than 1,000 VIP delegates and is one of the most challenging events on the calendar, according to Schulte.

Unlike a typical corporate environment, where travel flows can often be forecast, FIFA’s event and tournament-driven travel programme is defined by volatility. Plans regularly change, flights are rebooked at the last minute, and entire group movements must be adjusted in response to a match schedule.

“We have a very high level of rebookings and changes made at very short notice,” Schulte explains. “The entire programme is very, very agile and the [level of] flexibility we require is very, very high. That happens in other corporate businesses as well, but for us it's really intense… [and] we are travelling everywhere in the world – I mean, there can be sanctioned areas where we need to travel to because they're still [FIFA] members.”

A hybrid model designed for flexibility

Schulte created a structure that combines FIFA’s in-house expertise with the scale and reach of American Express Global Business Travel, the organisation's TMC partner.

The design of the model allows for rapid scaling. As volumes decrease between tournaments, GBT can redeploy agents to other accounts. When demand increases again, those same consultants – already trained in FIFA’s ways of working – can be reassigned to them, according to Schulte.

“That trained pool [of agents] is one of the major benefits [because] they can be pulled back into the FIFA environment very quickly,” she says. “We can advise two to three months in advance when we need to increase or reduce support… [and] that flexibility is essential.”

FIFA’s TMC selection process was lengthy and deliberate. Schulte’s criteria were clear: the partner needed to be genuinely global, willing to adapt its service model and able to support the association’s highly fluid programme.

“Even GBT had to adapt to our requirements,” Schulte says. “We're not like the normal A-to-Z booking process, so there was quite a lot of change on the GBT side. FIFA is breaking the walls and saying: ‘no, we don’t do it that way, we do it differently’… but the good thing is that we have the management support of GBT.”

The TMC’s agents were onboarded to the FIFA programme earlier this year, along with Amadeus’ Cytric as Schulte’s chosen online booking tool (for transient travel only).

What began as nine dedicated GBT consultants has now grown to 10. Rather than reducing headcount among FIFA’s internal team, Schulte has redefined the travel management function with a focus on project management and strategic sourcing.

“Before, they [the travel coordinators] were doing all the bookings – and they just did bookings. Now their roles have significantly changed. They are project managers who oversee an entire tournament from A to Z,” Schulte says.

Under her leadership, the team has undertaken training and is now involved in airline negotiations and building hotel programmes in host cities for events such as youth competitions, futsal tournaments and World Cup trophy tours.

Centralised management over fragmented local operations

Another impactful change that Schulte orchestrated was centralising the travel function globally. Historically, FIFA subsidiaries in host countries ran their own travel operations alongside the centralised FIFA team based in Zurich, resulting in disconnected systems and limited transparency.

After the 2023 Women’s World Cup, Schulte proposed consolidating everything into one global team, with this year’s FIFA Club World Cup the first major event run under the new structure. “It worked fantastically,” she says. “We really worked as one team.”

That centralised model will now underpin the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico, which Schulte predicts will be “the biggest sporting event ever” and is being hosted across 16 cities.

From there, the programme will pivot to Brazil for the Women’s World Cup in 2027, followed by Spain, Portugal and Morocco for 2030, with new subsidiaries opening and closing in each territory as FIFA’s footprint moves around the globe.

Even before consolidating the team, however, Schulte tackled one of the biggest inefficiencies inside FIFA’s travel programme: payments. She implemented a central lodge card solution that leveraged FIFA’s existing relationship with Visa (a football sponsor) to pay for flights and hotel bookings centrally. This eliminated invoice processing, enabled better automation into finance systems, and unlocked detailed reporting.

“That was the quickest win overall,” she explains. The efficiency gains were so significant that Schulte was internally recognised as a ‘Game Changer’ within her first year at FIFA. 

Building travel intelligence 

Following the introduction of centralised payments and online booking via Cytric, Schulte is now looking at ways to collect and analyse travel data. Daily data feeds from Amex GBT and Cytric flow into the FIFA’s central data hub, where internal data architects are building dashboards that examine traveller booking behaviour and spend patterns. While data specialist Cornovum supports the technical flow of data between platforms, all the analysis is taking place in-house.

“When it comes to data, what we expect and what we want to build for FIFA – for each project manager and budget owner – is [a customised Power BI dashboard] where they can see all the travel data required to make a good decision on tournaments and on project preparation as well,” Schulte says.

The objective is to leverage enriched data capture to not only assist with supplier negotiations but also to analyse booking trends and develop plans that influence “smarter” travel choices across the organisation.

“We have sustainability targets we want to achieve, so we need to reduce travel,” Schulte explains. “We cannot reduce tournament travel because football needs to be played with players and referees and with staff. But when it comes to the preparation, we need to be more effective.” Armed with the data, Schulte will soon look to implement carbon budgets for travel.

Additionally, the introduction of Cytric has allowed FIFA to modernise its approval workflows for transient business travel. Instead of pre-trip approval, employees now book travel and line managers automatically receive a notification with cost and itinerary details.

“Before, they approved without even knowing the cost. Now they see everything,” says Schulte. She’s also interested in exploring a deeper integration with Microsoft Teams via Cytric easy.

Another cornerstone of the new programme was the introduction of a formal duty-of-care partner, International SOS. Prior to Schulte’s arrival, travel risk management was largely reactive. Now, alerts, visa requirements, health information and real-time tracking are automatically provided for all travellers.

“We travel in every country in the world – including places people would rarely choose to visit,” she says. “Traveller care is extremely important for us.”

Measuring success

FIFA collects post-event feedback from staff, teams, delegates and guests. Despite the scale of structural change, Schulte says there has been no dip in traveller satisfaction – only efficiency gains.

“There was zero drop in service level,” she says. “That’s the most important metric for us.” Cost management is also high on the agenda, as is the successful delivery of a tournament.

“We’re analysing our contracts on a tournament basis. We're analysing our delivery against our budgets on a regular basis, and we see already that the contracts we have in place are benefiting us hugely… we see cost reductions already on the average ticket price and on the average room night,” she says.

And with such a vast pipeline of tournaments ahead, Schulte sees no end in sight. “I don’t see an end to my role in the near future,” she says. “There’s still a lot to optimise.”