Corporate Travel Management – 3 Min Read

This week we bring you 10 quotes and excerpts of speech made by some of the top thought leaders of the travel industry in conferences and seminars. It also brings their ideas and thought process to the fore. We call them industry leaders as they walk their talk.

“India offers exciting business opportunities owing to the growth in corporate travel and a significant middle-class population waiting to explore the world.”
– Sir Lloyd Marshall Dorfman (Founder, Travelex Group)

“A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.”
– John C. Maxwell (American Author & Speaker)

“The leisure traveller is buying a destination. The business traveller is buying the journey. The fun side is leisure travel, but corporate is where most companies, like mine, are going to make most of their money.”
–Dave Hershberger (President of Travel Leaders/Prestige Travel, Cincinnati, Ohio)

“The largest difference between selling leisure and corporate are the nuances. Within corporate travel, exceptional service is the differentiator between travel management companies. While corporate agents make sales based off of price and schedule…the customer’s real preference is high-touch, world-class service.”
– Christy Prescott (CEO of Corporate Travel Planners, San Antonio, Texas)

“To be in the corporate travel marketplace, you really have to be loaded up to provide the technology features, such as online booking systems. You have to have office technology; you have to have mid-office systems and a program that supports that. And in addition to technology, you have to have the reporting that corporations expect, the data that they can use to make decisions.”
– Jay Ellenby (President of Safe Harbors Business Travel, Bel Air, Maryland)

“I like to ask full-time practitioners if they ever travel with their clients. I believe that it is an essential element in understanding what one’s clients want—and more importantly, don’t want—when they travel.”
– Richard Turen (Editor, Churchill & Turen Media Group)

“It’s never easy to grow corporate travel business in a hyper-competitive market, and it isn’t going to get any easier.”
– Michael Boult (Senior vice president of corporate sales for Travel Leaders)

“What really excites me about business events is that it is not only businesses involved in tourism that benefit from hosting international events. Through hosting meetings and events, we are able to develop our intellectual capital and showcase fields and sectors where we have innovation and excellence to present to experts from around the world. This creates new networking and business opportunities, and it helps to position our country to benefit from the rapidly evolving global knowledge economy. And, of course, it advances trade, technology transfer and foreign direct investment.”
– Thomas J. Donohue (Minister for Travel and Tourism, South Africa)

“The Singapore Tourism Analytics Network (Stan) is an example of how Government will help the industry to make good use of technology and data. Stan consolidates and analyses all the tourism data that we have, including visitor arrivals, modes of travel, spending and movement patterns, website traffic and hotel industry information.”
–  Chee Hong Tat (Senior Minister of State for Trade & Industry and Education, Singapore)

“Business travel is becoming not just a significant part of business life, but also a significant part of the daily life of businessmen or women, business executives, as well as Government officials. Above all, business travel has become an important income-generating industry. Hotels, airlines, travel agents, convention and exhibition operators, catering services, transportation, retail, and a host of service providers stand to benefit from the booming businesses of this growing travel industry.”
–  Joshua Law (Director-General of Trade and Industry for Hong Kong)

We’ll try to bring you more doses of ideas and opinions from leading influencers of the business travel management area, but that’s for another day.