INTERVIEW
WORDS MAT THEW PARSONS
‘WHAT’S THE NEXT WAVE ?’ E
Capita Travel and Events’ CCO Trevor Elswood tells BBT why he thinks meetings are at the heart of the future of modern travel management
XHAUSTION IS A WORD normally associated with traveller wellbeing. But Trevor Elswood is concerned with exhaustion of the number crunching kind; and he believes buyers are certainly weary when it comes to leveraging data in their travel programmes. “What do people do next?” asks the chief commercial officer of Capita Travel and Events. “They’ve got a mature programme, they’ve got data, but they’ve exhausted it. Yes, they can negotiate a new airline route deal, but the challenge is the ability to see the impact of meetings and travel. Otherwise, they’re just buying a commodity.” For Capita – ranked sixth in this year’s BBT Leading 50 TMCs with a turnover of £570 million – the impact of meetings is under the microscope. “It’s incredibly linked to our whole business,” Elswood says. “It’s not travel with a bit of meetings… We want to look at unnecessary spend, and look at why are people travelling to meet people. “Corporates are controlling travel from the top down. The data was siloed – air, hotel, and you negotiate with suppliers based on that. So we asked: what’s the next wave? For our customer base, internal meetings repre- sented 70 or 80 per cent of meeting spend. It meant we had to think differently.
“We think about how they plan meeting the host: focus on enabling them to reduce unnecessary travel, and you’ll
PROFILE Trevor Elswood joined
Capita Travel and Events as chief commercial officer in 2011. He was previously managing director of BSI, an accommodation and meetings reservations and spend management firm. Before that he was head of account management at Thistle Hotels.
CORPORATES ARE CONTROLLING TRAVEL FROM THE TOP DOWN
have more of an impact. Buyers are saying ‘help me to in- fluence’, because they don’t know what they don’t know.” Last year Capita acquired the TMC NYS Corporate. Elswood is also managing director of NYS, and he credits NYS’s MeetingsPro technology for winning a new contract with Rolls-Royce this summer. MeetingsPro handles venue finding, website creation, delegate management and spend management for self-managed, small meetings. “NYS was ahead of the curve. Its meetings technology was powerful. We looked at its strengths; this was the gem. It needed to scale to realise what it had built.”
While some brands can be swallowed up into the parent company, the NYS name will remain for “strategic” reasons. “NYS is a brand people remember,” Elswood adds. It’s been a big year, he reflects, and 2019 will be about “maturing what we’re doing here”. But with a new tie-up with Globalstar Travel Management – a TMC network in 85 countries – Elswood will likely relish the challenge of helping to revitalise any “exhausted” travel programmes further afield.
50 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018
buyingbusinesstravel.com
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