RELATIONSHIPS
WE TRY TO LEAVE OUR CLIENTS
TO DO THE STRATEGISING, WHILE WE GET ON WITH THE DAY-TO-DAY WORK
isn’t in the same league – but that has its advantages. “To have access to all the senior executives, simply bumping into them in the corridor, is a real bonus,” says Kavanagh. Getting board- room buy-in by the water-cooler clearly makes one’s working life a lot easier.” What makes life a lot less easy is the nature of Kerry’s locations. The company is headquartered in Naas, 20 miles south-west of Dublin, and with a population of 20,000. Naas has 14 hotels, the poshest of which – the four-star Killashee – has just 141 rooms. That’s typical of Kerry’s sites. They are
FOOD FOR THOUGHT Olive Kavanagh, global travel manager at Kerry Group, and David Harpley, global account manager, HRS
After 13 years with Microsoft’s travel man- agement team, Olive Kavanagh decided it was time for a career change – a move to a company where she could put her accumu- lated knowledge and expertise to the best possible use. In 2015 she joined Ireland’s food giant Kerry Group, the company behind brands including Dairygold, Wall’s and Richmond sausages. To the uninitiated, the job would have
looked like a nightmare. In the space of 40 years, the erstwhile North Kerry Milk Products co-operative had acquired more than 100 companies. Starting with just 40 employees, the company now has a 24,000-strong workforce spread across 140 locations, from Belarus to Brazil, Poland to Panama, and the Netherlands to New Zealand. But, incredible as it may seem, it had no global travel programme. Most people would have backed away nervously, but Kavanagh is made of sterner stuff. “It was a blank page – that’s probably the piece that interested me the most. There wasn’t really any global strategy, nothing had been globally tendered, and I was brought in to globalise the entire travel programme,” she says.
After Microsoft (124,000 employees, global revenues of US$110 billion, net income of nearly US$16.6 billion), Kerry Group (one-fifth of the workforce, revenues of €6.4 billion, profit of €781 million)
74 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018
generally not in major city centres, and do not have many accommodation options, and what hotels there are tend to be small. This is not JW Marriott territory. It is, however, HRS’s territory. In fact, says global account manager David Harpley, it’s right up HRS’s street. “One of our key USPs is that we have people on the ground in key locations. Where we see gaps in the Kerry programme, we can send people out to fill those gaps.” Kavanagh chips in: “Our need is for
independent properties, that would not necessarily be in the GDSs. The challenge is to find those independents that meet corporate requirements.” Harpley explains: “At HRS, we try to leave our clients to do the strategising, while we get on with the day-to-day work. Olive has a key phrase – there is no such thing as ‘can’t do’ – and that’s something we subscribe to.” Kavanagh and Harpley are in contact on a daily basis and have weekly “touchpoints”, but meetings are a different matter. “I’m based just south of Dublin and David is in London, but last week we met in Shanghai,” says Kavanagh, “because that’s the way of the world we live in.”
In terms of the relationship – do they ac- tually get on? “It’s a case of work hard, play hard,” says Harpley. “We are not afraid to have those difficult conversations, but we do have some downtime and that’s something I find really valuable.” Kavanagh concludes: “Over the past couple of years I have often been asked how I have managed to achieve what I have, and I always say that I have definitely not done it all on my own.”
Do you have a perfect partnership with your TMC or supplier? There’s still time to enter the Travel Team of the Year category in the Business Travel Awards. Entries close Friday, 21 September. Apply now at
businesstravelawards.com
buyingbusinesstravel.com
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