SAP’s director of travel and expense in the Asia-Pacific region, Tarun Kumar, has been named BTN’s APAC Travel Buyer of the Year after successfully implementing an integrated travel booking and expense solution in China.
Kumar scored the top honour at the Business Travel Show APAC in Singapore this week, ahead of fellow finalists Kathryn Retumban, senior lead, global hotel programme at Emerson and Fei Wang, former APAC travel and expense manager at Philips.
Kumar led the SAP APAC team in a groundbreaking collaboration that transformed the company’s online travel request, booking and expense processes in China.
Working closely with his TMC partner, BCD Travel, Kumar enabled a compliant online booking capability that successfully integrated with SAP’s global travel request and expense tools, Concur Request and Concur Expense.
Overcoming complex regulatory and technical challenges, Kumar co-developed a first-of-its-kind solution for China: the end-to-end integration of booking and expense workflows linking BCD’s online booking tool TripSource China with Concur Request and Concur Expense, offering travellers a single sign-on platform that aligns with SAP’s global programme. This model has since been adopted by several organisations with global travel programmes.
“When it comes to travel, it's all about collaboration,” Kumar said. “I always see my collaborators as business partners, because if they are not there with you on the designing table, and they are just supposed to obey your asks, they may not deliver the group’s capabilities.
“They should be the part of solutioning and designing to become accountable and take responsibility to deliver the result,” he added.
AI event planning tool Nowadays wins BTS APAC Innovation Faceoff
Nowadays co-founder Anna Sun dominated this year's BTS APAC Innovation Faceoff
AI-powered event planning platform Nowadays won both the judges' and people's choice awards at this year's Business Travel Show APAC Innovation Faceoff. This achievement comes just six months after Nowadays also secured two top honours at the inaugural Business Travel Show America in New York last October.
Founded by sisters Anna Sun and Amy Yan, Nowadays enables planners to find and source venues, with automated searching and communication throughout the process easing the "logistical nightmare" of emails, callbacks, spreadsheets and other manual tasks in the process, Sun said.
Planners can compare cities to host an event side-by-side, based on their attendee list, to see potential costs, layovers and carbon impact associated with a destination. They can then detail their needs in natural language, which Nowadays can structure into a request for proposal and search a database of more than 400,000 venues to find the best fits and email the venue to check availability.
Data from the RFP is structured so planners can easily compare proposals on rates, concessions, attrition and other attributes rather than manually calculating them, she said.
Once a venue is selected, Nowadays can assist with negotiations, with AI agents able to talk to venues by phone or email. Negotiations are informed by data on venues in the platform as well as data from thousands of events to benchmark against, she said. The agents can negotiate in multiple languages.
Sun said Nowadays to date has supported "hundreds of companies in event planning," including Google, Amazon and BlackRock.
Nowadays was among five innovations presented during this year’s APAC Innovation Faceoff, triumphing over China Smart MICE Group, FCM’s AI assistant SAM, Thrust Carbon’s Engage AI and online booking platform TruTrip.
This year’s APAC judging panel included Adeline Kang, director, JCAP operations, travel meetings, card and fleet at MSD International, Priyanka Jakhmola, global travel director at Accenture, Elizabeth West, The BTN Group’s VP of content and last year’s APAC Innovation Faceoff winner Terence Eng, product director at Trip.Biz.