Leaders of the pack

Technology is one of the most powerful forces driving the changes we’re seeing in business travel. So who are the most influential people in this field? Mark Frary reports

ONE OF THE MOST interesting changes Buying Business Travel noticed last year when compiling its leading 50 travel management companies (TMCs) was the increasing importance of IT. For the first time, many TMCs listed their IT directors among their key personnel. Recognising the ever growing importance of technology in business travel in the UK, BBT decided to compile a list of the 20 people who have had the most influence in business travel technology over the past year.

To create this list we gathered together a panel of experts from across the industry, as follows (in alphabetical order):

Richard Boardman Chief executive of Reed & Mackay and chair of the technology working party at the Guild of Travel Management Companies (GTMC)

Simone Buckley Chief executive of the Institute of Travel & Meetings (ITM)

Mark Frary Technology expert and regular Buying Business Travel writer (chair)

Jamie Hindhaugh Head of production L2012 and head of sourcing – logistics for the BBC

Kevin May Editor of travel technology publication Tnooz

Simon McLean Managing director of Click Travel

Andrew Solum Consultant and travel buyer for Travel Industry Associates

Duncan Spokes Head of the business travel category at buying consortium Pro5 and the Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation

Paul Tilstone Managing director of GBTA Europe

Each was asked to name up to five people with influence in relation to business travel technology, although panellists were unable to name their own staff or suppliers. Many names appeared more than once and this is the basis for the ranking below. The basis for inclusion was very broad and included those people whose work in technology has affected the business traveller in a positive way, as well as heads of technology and chief executives working for business travel companies.

STEVE JOBS (DECEASED)
CEO, APPLE

As this feature looks at who has had the greatest influence in business travel technology over the past year, we make no excuses for including the late co-founder of Apple, who died from pancreatic cancer in early October. Steve Jobs was named more times by our panellists than anyone else, largely for his work in delivering iPhones and iPads into the hands of the world’s business travellers. Simon Mclean of Click Travel said: “The iPhone has changed people’s lives and its momentum in the business world is increasing all the time. The way people interact with each other and the services they use have been changed by the iPhone forever, and that will inevitably impact the way people organise their travel – both on a personal level and in business travel.” Consultant Andrew Solum listed Jobs “for his technology skills, bringing apps to the forefront of technology for the iPad and iPhone, and opening up yet further opportunities for the travel segment.” Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and adopted at birth. He started to work for videogame manufacturer Atari in his teens. Apple was founded by Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne (who later sold his share to the two Steves for $800) in Jobs’ adopted parents’ garage in Los Altos, California. Over the years since then, Apple has created a number of game-changing devices, leading up to the recent launch of the latest version of the iPhone, the 4S. In its most recent financial quarter, the company sold more than 17 million iPhones, 11m iPads, 6m iPods and 4m Mac computers.

STEVE SINGH
CEO, CONCUR

The name of Concur and its CEO Steve Singh came up again and again among our panellists. What drew their admiration was the company’s ability to focus on detail in order to develop the best solution for end-to-end travel and expense (T&E) processing. Concur was founded in 1993 by Steve’s brother Rajeev and Mike Hilton, now executive vice-president of marketing for the company, with a focus on saving companies’ money through process automation in the area of expense management. In 1996 the company drafted in Steve, who had been a general manager at IT company Symantec, to be its CEO. Since then, the company has grown to the point where it handles a claimed 10 per cent of the world’s T&E spend, which it puts at $35 billion. Along the way it has changed shape under Steve Singh’s direction, acquiring Outtask and its Cliqbook online booking technology in 2006 and Tripit, the itinerary management technology company, in 2011.

LARRY PAGE
CO-FOUNDER AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE, GOOGLE

Google’s co-founder was another name that appeared numerously in our panel’s inclusions. Over the years, Google has been astonishingly successful, particularly at generating revenue from ads alongside its search results, but it is its other activities that have drawn admiration from our panellists. They cited Google Maps and Earth, which have changed the landscape of hotel booking, as well as its Google Translate API, enabling travel companies to serve up international versions of their websites with little in the way of investment. Click Travel’s Simon Mclean said: “Google’s biggest impact on our industry has been the services they have delivered. Take Google Maps – the ubiquitous standard for delivering mapping, directions and geo location services that is now embedded into many online business travel services.” Google has only just got started in this area, and many of our panel pointed to Google’s acquisition of ITA and its fare search technology. Whether it will disrupt the business travel sector in the same way that it has other industries remains to be seen. Page co-founded Google at Stanford University with Sergey Brin in 1998, and returned as CEO this year after the departure of Eric Schimdt who had held the role for the past 10 years.

SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE
FOUNDER OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Our panel cited Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who now works at MIT and is director of the W3 Consortium web standards body, as worthy of inclusion for “opening up the world via the internet” and “bringing countless opportunities in the travel arena”. Oxford graduate Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while at the European particle physics laboratory CERN in 1989, where he developed the first web browser. In 2009, Sir Tim was asked to join the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, a body designed to open up access to government data.

JIM DAVIDSON
CEO, FARELOGIX

Our panel of experts saw Farelogix as “a disruptive force in the airline distribution model” thanks to its development of directconnect technology to bypass the traditional global distribution system (GDS)-TMC relationship. Farelogix technology is used by both Air Canada and American Airlines, carriers at the forefront of the current battle. At the company’s head is someone who knows a lot about distribution. Prior to Farelogix, Jim Davidson was president and CEO of Amadeus Global Travel, North America, head of sales and marketing at System One and vice-president of marketing at Reed Travel Group/OAG.

BRIDGET BLAISE-SHAMAI
MANAGING DIRECTOR, DISTRIBUTION AND MERCHANDISING STRATEGY, AMERICAN AIRLINES

Blaise-Shamai sits at the centre of one of the most interesting and perhaps game-changing battles to affect the sector in recent years – she directs the team responsible for setting distribution policy at AA, whose parent company went into Chapter 11 in November. The panel cited her team for “tackling the lock the GDS giants had on the aviation sector, and coming up with a new distribution model, changing the role of distributor, intermediary and end user, their cost structures and ultimately their survival”.

PATRICK GRADY
CEO AND CHAIRMAN, REARDEN COMMERCE

If ever there were a tech company that liked to disrupt existing travel markets, it’s Rearden Commerce. The company has formed partnerships with more than a hundred TMCs including American Express and Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) and has developed an e-commerce platform called Deem that brings together inventory from the likes of ITA, Farelogix and other direct-connects. The company’s founder, CEO and driving force is Patrick Grady, a true web visionary when it comes to the next generation of business travel.

JON REEVE
DIRECTOR, TRADE RELATIONS, EVOLVI

Rail has become an increasingly important channel for TMCs in recent years and this growth can be largely placed at the door of the technology companies that have made rail easier to manage. Evolvi, which provides rail booking services for eight of the top 10 TMCs, grew out of the predominantly leisure travel agency Harry Weeks. As one of the original design team behind the Evolvi tool, company director Jon Reeve earns a deserved place in our top 20.

JOHN T CHAMBERS
CEO, CISCO

For many years, the name of software and network services provider Cisco was barely known to the general public but, more recently, awareness of the company has grown dramatically. More recently, CEO John Chambers has spearheaded the organisation’s development in other areas and it’s this diversification that wins him a place in our panel’s hearts. Cisco’s development of the immersive video-conferencing technology Telepresence and the acquisition of web-conferencing company Webex looks set to shape the business travel agenda markedly in the near future.

GLENN MORGAN
HEAD OF SERVICE TRANSFORMATION, BRITISH AIRWAYS

British Airways has always relied on technology investment and it has been instrumental in the company’s ability to remain competitive in a very difficult market over the past 10 years. The transformational nature of technology is recognised in the job title of the next exec chosen by our panel, Glenn Morgan, who also sits on IATA’s Simplifying the Business group, which focuses on using technology to drive costs out of aviation. The panel pointed to “development and on-going improvement of self-check in and virtual boarding cards”, and recognised Morgan as a “champion of enterprise mobility”.

CHARLES PETRUCCELLI
PRESIDENT, GLOBAL TRAVEL SERVICES, AMERICAN EXPRESS

When you are a TMC, it takes a brave soul to suggest doing something that gnaws away at the very heart of your business, but this is something that Charles Petruccelli has done. Our panel nominated him for being at the head of “the first major TMC to embrace Telepresence internally and as a client solution”. Petruccelli, a graduate of France’s HEC business school, has been with Amex for 33 years and has been awarded the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government.

SIMON BARKER
CEO, CONFERMA

Billback is a curiously British phenomenon. The system of a hotel issuing an invoice to a company’s hotel booking agent or TMC rather than taking payment from a guest is nowhere near as popular elsewhere as here in the UK. It is no surprise, then, that a very British company is at the heart of the technology dealing with it – Manchesterbased Conferma. It is a system that helped panellist Duncan Spokes reduce headcount for handling hotel billback from three full-time equivalent (FTE) to 0.5 FTE when he was working at LV=. Simon Barker founded Conferma in 2004 and since then it has partnered with many of the business travel industry’s biggest names.

ROBERT WISEMAN
CTO, SABRE TRAVEL NETWORK

Sabre is one of the biggest spenders on technology research in the travel sector, investing more than $100m a year in research and development. The company’s chief technology officer for the past five years has been Robert Wiseman, who has driven a standard-based approach to servers, operating systems, databases and more, allowing Sabre’s business units to focus on the business rather than the technology. Sabre handles 45,000 transactions a second and operates the fourth busiest API in the world, after Google, Facebook and Twitter.

BILL BRINDLE
DIRECTOR, GROUP DISTRIBUTION AND TECHNOLOGY, HRG

TMC HRG has always ploughed its own furrow on technology with the guiding hand of Bill Brindle on the tiller. Brindle was instrumental in developing one of the first hotel booking tools to manage non-GDS content and was the driver behind the creation of the Universal Super Platform, HRG’s common workspace which gives access to a wide range of services and content. Recently, Brindle has signed a worldwide contract to connect HRG globally to Travelport’s new Universal API.

ANDREW WINTERTON
PRESIDENT OF SUPPLIERS, PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY, CARLSON WAGONLIT TRAVEL

Global TMCs are increasingly focused on driving efficiency through standardisation and automation, and Carlson Wagonlit Travel is no different. Heading up the TMC’s giant leaps in this area is Andrew Winterton, who leads the company’s global supplier management team as well as its IT and product management organisations. Winterton has a strong heritage in travel technology, working for OAG, Galileo and American Express before joining CWT.

IAN FERGUSON
DIRECTOR OF IT, EXPOTEL

You need far-sighted people when it comes to technology and one of our panellists described Ferguson, who joined Expotel from BCD Travel this year, as “a real visionary [with a] good understanding of GDS and infrastructure”. Ferguson is also “very eloquent”, a useful trait when trying to win a business over to new game-changing technologies. He was one of the first advocates of online booking tools, an enthusiasm he has brought to Expotel.

TONY MIKKELSEN
VICE-PRESIDENT, SALES AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, CONTGO

Our panel singled out technology company Contgo for “innovations in platform design and working in the travel industry with specific focus on mobile solutions”, such as its Mobile Travel Assistant. Technology is in Mikkelsen’s DNA: he has previously worked for Sabre, GetThere and EMC. A Danish/American citizen, he speaks English, French Danish, German and Italian.

IAN LOWER
IT DIRECTOR, BSI/CAPITA BUSINESS TRAVEL

Hotel booking agencies are very keen to push their technology, but our panel highlighted BSI for its leadership in the sector. Driving the technology behind that is Ian Lower, who joined BSI in 2002 from a technology career in the finance sector. He is now a member of the BSI board and was additionally appointed IT director of Capita Business Travel after BSI’s acquisition by the travel management company in 2010.

NIGEL WALLBRIDGE
CEO OF NOMAD DIGITAL

According to one of our panellists, Nomad is “one of those wonderful companies that few people have heard of, yet they’ve had such an impact on our lives”. Nomad is a leading provider of onboard wifiservices on the UK rail network. “High-speed internet on trains has hugely increased rail’s attractiveness as a form of transport for the business traveller,” another panellist said. Driving that is Nomad founder Nigel Wallbridge, an INSEAD graduate and former president of Cable & Wireless in the Americas.

GEOF KALEY
MANAGING DIRECTOR, ONE TRANSPORT

Jamie Hindhaugh proposed Geof for our list for “building a business platform that enables the successful aggregation of UK-wide cab bookings, but also for introducing Virtual Fleet, which enables all cabs to be tracked and allocated according to their location, hitting both CO2 and efficiency targets”. Geof, a former London cab driver and chairman of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, has used his industry knowledge and coupled it with his enthusiasm for technology to create something truly groundbreaking.