Her impressive communication and
presentation skills have been honed from her early years as a drama student, first in the UK and then in the US where she had a won a scholarship to the University of Georgia. She augmented her meagre income by selling airline tickets to fellow students and loved it. Ever the entrepreneur, she started importing down duvets from the UK while in a teaching post, starting the business with US$500 she won in a tennis game. The business eventually encompassed a manufacturing plant, wholesale and retail arms and ten retail outlets along the East Coast and involved travel to Eastern Europe to purchase the down. Slumberdown saw its potential and bought the company. A failed spell as a housewife drove her to a
local community college and she took entry level classes in travel and within six months was working for a travel agency owned by one of her teachers and had bought half the business. “I absolutely loved the industry and more than down quilts!” she says. Maritz identified the company as a good
acquisition and bought it within 12 months and Susan stayed on for seven years – “learning the game from the ground up” – leaving as VP of international sales, having taken sales from US$2m to US$33m in that period. A life-changing experience in 1992 on a cruise ship that sank in the middle of the night in the Straits of Malacca forced a change of pace as she recovered from the trauma, initially in a jungle hospital in Malaysia. It was
altogether an unsettling period for her as she had lost her job and her husband died. “You’re down and out, you almost drowned, your husband is dead and you have no money. But I do like taking risks.” Surprisingly, she began thinking that mult-
inational clients needed a better solution to collect data than the one global system they were being forced to use. International Software Products was born, in 1993, to make the data change and not the
wanted, from what agency they wanted.” She pitched the idea to Derek Jewson,
then at Unilever, and he challenged her to amalgamate data from the UK, France and Chad. “And we did it” she says triumphantly. In 1999 TRX came along and made Susan
and her partners an offer and she found herself working on the executive management team until 2011 when she wanted to jump ship again, and start another venture. “I thought there was a disconnect on data;
“We set up a data dating service matching those seeking data with those who have the data they want and need”
systems, by using a consolidation methodology that honoured the systems used in different parts of the world. It allowed the data to be switched into one main database and reporting tool and, if necessary, back out in different formats to regional reporting tools. It was revolutionary. “It’s about right and
wrong,” she explains. “I respect people’s individual ways of doing business and basically invented a switch so a system wasn’t imposed on a global programme. A corporate could use whatever system they
not about the technology to collect it, that’s step one, but what you do with it, so I went off, studied it and researched it and set up an advisory board to trial some of the ideas.” Fake money and fake data was replaced by
real money and real data as the business model morphed into The Data Exchange. ”I’m trying to find a way to help the industry by liberating the data,” she explains. “My vision is sitting at a desk with data
projected around you so you can multi-task. You can’t comprehend data on a flat screen but you need to get in it using holographic technology,” she says. Hopley has swapped Stateside living for Wales
and is working with Bangor University on the technology which, she says, “is getting there”. She views the future of business travel management with real enthusiasm and as a chance to shine. “This is the most exciting time for travel managers. They can expand their jobs as never before, it’s very exciting. There’s never been a more fruitful opportunity.”
THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE 27
www.lucydevereux.co.uk
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