NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

After a mighty challenging 2009, CONNECT asks CWT Asia Pacific’s boss, Martin Warner, to give an overview of business travel’s recent history and some thoughts on how he believes 2010 will play out

CONNECT: How would you sum up 2009?

MARTIN WARNER: In a word – challenging. CWT clients didn’t stop travelling per se, but many did decrease their travel frequency, especially long-haul international destinations; others downgraded their class of travel, or postponed or cancelled internal meetings.

We found that domestic and short-haul travel was less impacted during 2009, with clients taking advantage of low promotional fares introduced by many airlines, which helped to minimise the overall slowdown in the industry.

2009 also created huge opportunities for us; many companies that had not traditionally placed as much attention on cost savings or maximising travel budgets were suddenly very interested. Our programme managers and sales teams were very much in demand helping companies develop solutions.

And towards the end of the year there was a return to travel by those companies that had reduced the number of trips or delayed travel. This brought new challenges as we had to ramp up our operations very quickly – not an easy task and I have to really thank all of our

Martin Warner was photographed at his Singapore offices in December 2009

Traveller and Transaction Services teams for all their hard work and effort during this time.

C: What would you say your main achievements were in 2009?

MW: According to an independent survey, our employees continue to be engaged in spite of what has been the toughest ever year for most of them. For me, that’s very important; I strongly believe that satisfied and engaged employees have a direct correlation to happy and satisfied clients.

Additionally, in spite of the inevitable pressure on costs, CWT introduced many new initiatives to enhance the customer experience. For example in Asia Pacific we introduced CWT Listens, which gives us immediate feedback from travellers and travel arrangers about their experience when making a travel reservation. This feedback has been invaluable and enabled us to respond by getting to the root cause of areas of concern. We’ve also used the analysis to drive continuous improvement. The feedback scores have improved over the last year and I see this as a very significant achievement.

There are also many examples of great work by our programme managers over the year. CWT helped one client achieve savings of over US$450,000 in just three months by changing how their travellers make bookings. That’s a pretty significant number. For another client we developed solutions that contributed to their overall corporate social responsibility efforts.

And despite the challenging environment, CWT continued to invest in technology and launch new products, such as CWT Value Calculator, CWT Policy Builder, and continued to enhance products such as CWT Program Management Center and CWT Portrait.

C: What are clients asking for today?

MW: Our clients continue to engage with us to establish ways of improving value. This usually involves ways to reduce the overall cost of their travel programme, or finding solutions as to how they can travel more with the same budget.

Buying behaviour – as in the booking process – now has a more significant impact than ever before on the prices paid for travel. As demand increases, the ability to secure lower fares and rates will become more difficult, therefore advance booking and immediate ticketing should become more of the norm to ensure companies secure the best value for their travel spend. Inherent to this will be the need for

travel arrangers to share with travellers all options offered by the travel counsellor to speed up the decision making process.

C: What is your projection for business travel in 2010?

MW: We believe that while there are signs of recovery in a number of economies, the future outlook can best be described as uncertain. This is evidenced by the frequently changing and conflicting macro-economic statistics and reports that are released.

Unfortunately, the uncertain macroeconomic picture ties almost directly to the fortunes of the business travel sector. We are finding that as a directly controllable cost, travel budgets remain generally tight and travel policies continue to be centred on cost avoidance and containment – companies continue to watch costs including travel.

The increase in demand for air travel seems to be occurring before the airlines have the ability or confidence to put supply back to previous levels. I forecast an increase in the cost of travel in the short term prior to capacity increasing.

C: What will be your key challenges in 2010?

MW: The good news is that the level of business activity has been gradually rebounding in the last several weeks, to levels above those in 2008, giving a positive indication of what’s in store for the business travel industry.

Bearing in mind that the permanence of this increase in demand is still an open question, balancing our staffing numbers against sudden increases in demand will be a challenge.

Up Close with Martin Warner

Martin began his career at CWT UK in 1980. Fourteen years later, he joined the company’s multinational client team. 1997 saw a big move to Sydney, where Martin took on a vice president of sales and account management role for Asia Pacific and Latin America. Six years on, he was promoted to the role of executive vice president, global account solutions. Martin has been COO of CWT Asia Pacific since 2008.

What was your best travel experience in 2009?

Two great holidays. One to Siem Reap – exploring Angkor Wat was breathtaking. Then my most relaxing holiday was in Australia where we took the train from Alice Springs to Darwin. The region is so remote there is no network access – blissful!

What are you most looking forward to in 2010?

We have a family holiday planned to the Philippines, a country I haven’t explored, so I am very much looking forward to that. Also, my eldest daughter will reach a milestone in her life when she starts university. It seems like her first day at school was only yesterday.

What do you enjoy most about living in Asia?

The huge diversity – there are so many cultures, food and experiences that one can enjoy. Singapore is an ideal base, both from a business and personal perspective. It’s an efficient business centre and a well-connected one, which makes for convenient business travel – and it’s also great for making short trips to some amazing destinations in Asia.

You travel a lot. How do you relax when you’re on the move?

Given the amount of time I spend on planes – in 2009 I did 21 business trips – my downtime tends to be on the long-haul flights, and that’s where I catch up with reading and watching movies.