NBTA is proud to report that all corporate travel buyers on Business Travel News’s 25 Most Influential Executives in the Business Travel Industry in 2008 are NBTA members. NBTA would like to congratulate these four travel managers for their outstanding efforts and contributions to the corporate travel industry.

Janice Chang
Corporate Director
Global Travel, Meetings & Special Events Planning
Northrop Grumman Corporation

Janice Chang and her team created a tool allowing hoteliers to submit RFP responses instantaneously, sort submissions for travel administrations, customize NBTA’s hotel RFP and send out submissions for consideration. Rate audits can also be conducted through this tool. Chang also added to the RFP county designations for hotels to adhere to federal per diem rates, the NBTA Hotel Committee adopted as a new field in its modular RFP.

Kathy Hall-Zientek
Manager of Travel Services
Moog

Kathy Hall-Zientek this year organized and obtained government approval for a legal not-for-profit trade association for ARC-accredited Corporate Travel Departments (CTD). The CTD Association, chaired by Hall-Zientek, will allow members to share best practices and benchmarking information.

Susan Lichtenstein
Director of Global Travel, Meetings & Events
Cisco Systems

Working with government contractors, pharmaceutical firms and retailers, Susan Lichtenstein integrated Web 2.0 into the Cisco corporate travel program to create social networks, blogs and wiki forums. These social networking mediums provided a two-way communications channel to ease travelers into management process changes.

Megan Stowe
Global Strategic Sourcing Mobility Manager
Intel

Megan Stowe this year shared with her colleagues a technique that steps outside the conventional boundaries of travel management – she allowed her travelers to bypass preferred booking channels and challenged them to find cheaper rates and fares through supplier web sites. In doing this, she proved that more was spent on hotels and rental cars booked independently, and found that money was saved on domestic airfares. In seeing this, Intel was able to change its travel policy to allow some U.S. travelers to book air fares directly through carrier web sites with no impact on its ability to meet booking volumes.

View all 25 of the Most Influential Executives of 2008
(Business Travel News)

Return to Connecting News January 2009