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”.
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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.
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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 – Manchester- based 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.