On Wednesday night at The Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta, Business Travel News hosted the 40th Annual Travel Manager of the Year and Best Practitioners awards and reception with more than 300 of the industry’s top corporate travel and procurement professionals in attendance. Award recipients were chosen by BTN editors from nominations submitted by the industry. BTN Editorial Director Elizabeth West announced the winners, recognizing Gilead Sciences Associate Procurement Director – Global Travel, Meetings & Events Steve Sitto as Travel Manager of the Year. BTN named five 2024 Travel Management Best Practitioners: Elevance’s Travis Steed, Akamai Technologies’ Priscilla Campbell, Meta’s Eric Rhode, Salesforce’s Dorian Stonie and Oracle’s Brian Hendrickson.
The reception was hosted by Marriott International and sponsored by Air Canada, American Express Global Business Travel, Cvent, Marriott Bonvoy, Sixt, and United for Business.
The 2024 BTN Travel Manager of the Year
Over the last 18 months, Gilead Sciences’ Steve Sitto has turned around a complex travel program that was losing compliance among travelers, with only 55 percent of travel activities moving through the program. After several months of listening across 43 markets and building support and influence across his company’s leadership team, Sitto shifted the business to a new travel management company relationship, streamlined policy, reconfigured the technology stack and relaunched the program.
In the process he leaned heavily into robotic process automation internally and into machine learning- and AI-powered products and services to streamline the program and connect disparate stakeholders behind the scenes. Travelers, certainly, but also executive assistants and security teams, in particular, were included in the connectivity stream, receiving automated notifications of trip progress to ensure visibility, support and safety.
While earlier in his career, Sitto has been an innovator with and supporter of startup providers—and experienced some program setbacks as his nascent partners shut down or got acquired. This time, rather than focusing on startups, he’s helped boost the innovation tools of his new TMC and worked to evolve those technologies and services, often those working behind the scenes to improve efficiencies at the TMC and better support travelers.
He was a first mover on BCD Travel’s AI-powered telephony and email systems, offering his program to help refine the algorithms in play. Similarly, he has worked with BCD to evolve chatbot technology that performs key tasks on spoken or texted requests. He has influenced the Gilead finance team to pilot BCD’s AI-powered payment reconciliation processes and has seen promise with the time savings from the AI assist. Sitto is also working with Advito on AI-powered data projects that will benefit his program as well as refine solutions for other Advito clients.
Internally, Sitto worked creatively to wrap technologies around Gilead travelers. He has configured responsive messaging within the BCD Travel app to enable travelers with detailed, location- and itinerary-specific policy instructions and local recommendations. He has enabled robotic process automation around loyalty program membership with key suppliers by identifying unaffiliated travelers via their profiles and providing QR codes to get them signed up for membership in response to the final booking.
He is additionally working on a Microsoft Teams-based chatbot to deliver travel policy information and has a roadmap to enable AI-responsiveness that will communicate the benefits of the Gilead travel program as well as the benefits Gilead travelers can tap into via supplier loyalty.
Since the relaunch of the responsive, AI-enhanced program, Gilead Travel compliance has jumped by 35 percent globally.
The 2024 BTN Best Practitioners
Each of BTN’s 2024 Best Practitioners addressed an urgent issue challenging the models of modern travel management. They are diverse in their focus, but joined by their shared creativity, aptitude for innovation and collaboration, and excellence.
Who: Travis Steed, Elevance Health Travel Services Manager
What: As meetings volume kicked into high gear, Steed collaborated with the Elevance internal meetings and events team to produce an Attendee Management Dashboard that combines HR data, BCD agency data and Cvent data to highlight discrepancies, streamline meeting reports like rooming lists, departure/arrival reports and flight costs, and upload room lists directly to hotels. The tool replaces the work of one to two full-time staff members, who may now be deployed on high-value contributions to the increasing and complex event volume at Elevance Health.
Who: Priscilla Campbell, Akamai Technologies Director of Global Travel & Expense
What: Enabling internal collaboration in the world of remote work is one of the biggest hills to climb in the post-pandemic business environment. It is a challenge, some companies have figured out, in which travel management has a clear role to play. For collaborating with HR and facilities management to understand the geographic challenges of remote employees and then using travel supplier relationships and industry know-how to establish a critical network of satellite meeting hubs around the globe to serve Akamai Technologies’ highly distributed workforce.
Who: Eric Rhode, Meta Director of Global Travel, Expense, Corporate Card
What: For delivering a dynamic carbon calculation and value on flight emissions in the booking process, based on real-time route and metal, so travelers can make a fully informed choice about the real cost of a business trip. Meta uses an emission value informed by the cost of renewable aviation fuel. Rhode collaborated with CWT, its embedded Spotnana innovation center and booking platform, and Thrust Carbon to display that value in the booking process. Rhode will compare the dynamic pre-trip data with Advito post-trip analysis to ‘reality check’ it monthly for continued model improvement.
The following 2024 Best Practitioners each in his separate lanes tackled the challenge of New Distribution Capability, with bold action and no hesitation to evolve functional NDC rails for now and the future.
Who: Brian Hendrickson, Oracle Travel Operations Director
What: For working with Get There, Sabre, CWT and a number of airlines, but specifically American Airlines to enable, test and drive improvement across a legacy ecosystem for NDC. In the past 6 months, Oracle has put 5 percent of its air volume through NDC channels, with an estimated savings of $500K. The move has also encouraged travelers to stay within the program and not seek low fares or product visibility elsewhere.
Who: Dorian Stonie, Salesforce Senior Director of Global Travel
What: For driving, monitoring and facilitating NDC evolution across the ecosystem with Concur T2, American Express Global Business Travel, American Airlines and United Airlines Salesforce currently books 14 percent of American and X percent of United fares through NDC connections. Thirty-five percent of the bookings reflect savings against EDIFACT fares, mostly from access to continuous pricing. Based on six weeks of active bookings, savings of about $1M are projected for the full year.
