Kim Hamer, senior director of global sourcing at Visa, was named
Business Travel News' 2022 Travel Manager of the Year in recognition of
her work in a pioneering NDC project
“It had to be someone like Kim,” said United Airlines
managing director of digital sales Anthony Toth, who authored one of the three
nominations BTN received for Visa senior director of global travel and events sourcing
Kim Hamer to be considered for BTN’s 2022 Travel Manager of the Year Award.
The achievements that led to Hamer winning that award are
easy to describe: she is the first travel manager to implement a New
Distribution Capability (NDC) channel for her programme at scale that brings corporate-negotiated
airline retailing options into a consumable managed travel product through her
agency.
Explaining what that really means – and the industry’s
hard-fought path to get there – takes something of a history lesson.
Hamer has seen that history in motion – some might call it
slow motion. When the International Air Transport Association (IATA) introduced the
concept of NDC in 2012, she was the global travel manager
for luxury retail brand Coach. That was five jobs ago for the travel management
veteran. Hamer cut her travel teeth at BCD Travel in a global account
management role, then moved up the ranks through buyer-side positions at
Accenture, Baxter, Huron Consulting and other companies before moving back to
the seller side in 2018 to head up strategy and customer success at WhereTo, a
next-generation booking tool startup acquired in 2020 by FCM.
Throughout Hamer’s career journey, IATA’s NDC concept has
been in various stages of reality. It always held the promise of delivering a
more personalised flight experience than could be achieved through a
straight-up global-distribution-system connection.
Within GDS systems, airline content has been a
hard-to-differentiate commodity. While there has been development with branded
fares, airlines have long been frustrated with the inability to sell fare
attributes like bag-check services, seat selection, priority boarding, in-flight
WiFi access and meals through the agency channel.
Buyers and travellers have
been frustrated with the inability to access this content in online booking
tools or through the agency; plus, it has been a pain to track and reconcile
spend for the ancillary products and services that airlines in 2008 started to unbundle
from ticket prices. What about getting the data or even acknowledgment of that ancillary
spend toward contracted goals? Plenty of travel managers and airlines innovated
to create workarounds, but it hasn’t always been pretty.
Still, NDC was a hard sell. There were a lot of questions
swirling around the new standard at that time. What would NDC mean for the
managed travel ecosystem? What would it mean for costs? And who would bear
them? What would it mean for the travel buyer? Were there any real reasons for
the managed travel buyer to support this change?
Or, devoid of new customised
access to ancillary content, which was not immediately available even as NDC started
to catch on with airlines, was the industry just investing in complexity so carriers
could save some GDS dollars? Would buyers pick up savings in the margins if
they accepted NDC channels? If that was it, the whole endeavouur seemed an
awfully heavy lift.
On top of that, not a single corporate booking tool at the time could
display or transact the products or services that would make airline-retailing
dreams a reality for managed business travellers.
Make me a believer
But times change and technologies change, even in the
managed travel space. Airlines pursued NDC content strategies while GDSs and booking
technologies pursued broader content aggregation and display strategies. Through
industry education efforts, some buyers opened their minds to the possibilities
of negotiating airline contracts at the ticket-attribute level – and what that
could mean to their travellers.
Hamer took a leadership role in the NDC
education process. As recent chair of the Global Business Travel Association’s aviation
committee, she explored the concept in depth with airlines and as part of that
role ran a number of panel sessions on NDC to raise awareness of its
potential.
To say that the number of buyers ready to pursue NDC
strategies was a minority, however, would be a vast understatement. The few who
have are among the industry’s most progressive and most influential in terms of
programme size, and the most demanding of their suppliers.
Hamer is among that elite
group but chose to stay under the radar with her programme, rarely speaking about
her project in public forums. Hamer’s strategy required vision, methodology and
patience for a long game. It also required leadership to collaborate across multiple
industry players – ultimately, Serko, CWT, United Airlines and Travelfusion – with
an uncompromising fortitude to see the project through.
But it was never about technology for the sake of
technology. Hamer’s NDC journey with the Visa travel programme started with the
business traveller.
“The voice we heard from employees is that we needed
something that was going to be user friendly,” said Hamer. “Something that
would enable us to be a bit more self-service but provide travellers with the
right choices at the right budget – and enable them to make the right decisions
for that budget. So that kind of sent me down a certain path.”
That path was two-fold for Hamer. First, it led to content
and the ability to pull in preferred supplier content from wherever it lived,
but with the goal of keeping employees within the preferred agency and online
booking workflow. Second, it led to user experience. Was the content easy to
access, clearly presented and intuitive to book? Was it relevant to the
individual user? Would it inspire trust in the programme?
What it absolutely should not do was leave travellers to book
a base ticket with the agency and be forced to toggle over to the airline
website to ensure they get their seat selection, pre-paid WiFi or entitlements
that come with their status.
“From that standpoint, we had to determine if we had the
right toolkit, and we were hearing from travellers that we had some
opportunities to make some improvements,” said Hamer. “We heard from travellers
that they needed something human-centric, something that would offer an
experience they would do on their own, if they were purchasing travel personally.”
To Hamer, that eventually would include predicating airline search
on the individual’s status and offering ancillary products in the core booking
workflow. It also would include ensuring every booking was supported by Visa’s
agency of record, which Hamer was also open to changing if her current provider
had hesitations about pursuing her vision for a personalised, digitised
programme.
Pushing the boundaries with collaboration
“One thing that was really unique about how Kim structured the
[request for proposal] was how she involved the users right from the beginning.
She required us to give users in each region access to Zeno,” said Tony
D’Astolfo, SVP North America for Serko, whose online booking tool Hamer chose
as Visa’s global partner. “She wasn’t going to trust us that we told her it
works. She wanted her users to tell her it works. I give her a lot of credit
for that approach, and it got us over the line in the RFP.”
CWT EVP and chief customer officer Nick Vournakis referred
to Zeno as a “challenger booking tool” – one that has been willing to take on industry
giants like Concur and GetThere that tend to dominate in the large, global
enterprise space, but just needed that big opportunity.
Hamer knew she needed a collaborator with speed to market. A
striver like Serko might be more inclined to mold the tool and make the technology
adjustments that would step up to her vision. Plus, the team had shown the
foundational tool was ready for innovation. That said, she expected the same of
her travel management company, and went out to bid to ensure Visa had a team on
that side willing to go all in with Serko’s Zeno tool. Not every TMC is willing
to incorporate another booking tool, especially if it has its own
challenger-level tool the company needs to push above a player like Zeno.
Visa’s incumbent partner CWT was ready to move. “Kim and Visa were focused very singularly on the travel
experience and how to deliver an improved experience around the world,” said
Vournakis. “And while there are a lot of things we know we have the capability
to do, the hardest part for CWT – or any traditional TMC for that matter – is to
find a customer who’s willing to make a bet, take a few chances and lead from [out]
front to do some trailblazing. To work with a partner like that is a great
opportunity… and the end result has got to be better than all the staid
solutions from the past.”
United Airlines joined the team as Visa’s preferred
supplier, and aggregator Travelfusion brought the NDC distribution pipes to the
table.
Making it real
As the group came together, it was clear that enabling
unique value through NDC and servicing those tickets holistically wasn’t going
to be easy. Dusty distribution frameworks, dated transaction standards, TMC platforms
predicated on the die-hard Passenger Name Record – all these and more have
frustrated industry players intent on delivering the promise of NDC.
“We’ve seen a lot of interesting progress on the margins as
it relates to NDC… to solve for a single market or for some kind of outlier,”
said Vournakis. “Kim and Visa are the first ones to bring the potential of NDC
into the core of the programme and to deliver unique value to the corporation.”
But there are pros and cons to turning on new technology
solutions, because you can't take the new technology and just switch them on in
the old environment. Rebuilding and rewiring that environment took a lot of
change management and a lot of testing, with each player relying on the others
to deliver the changes that would make the programme work.
“We wanted to give people multiple choices and build that
into policy,” Hamer said. “We also were looking ahead to what would be
available to us through our NDC content negotiations to understand how we would
pull that in and how we could display those negotiated bundles so travellers
could choose the best value relevant to them.”
Travelfusion adjusted content pipes to ensure the choices appeared
intuitively with multiple classes of service all on one screen in Zeno’s Next
Generation Storefront.
“It was a lot of work from the customer to say, ‘this is
confusing, but that’s not,’ or ‘now this makes sense, but I need to see it with
the Visa branded fares,’ that are piped in through Travelfusion,” said
D’Astolfo. “If you think these are simple conversations, they aren’t. It’s hard
to adequately display all this information in a way that’s not confusing to the
user. All of that had to be really collaborative with United and Travelfusion.”
As one partner would make a change, it would affect functions
up and down the stream.
“We have
multiple systems coming together and that’s been the inherent challenge in this
process. We’ve connected an API with the front end OBT and also the mid- and
back office but we also have the GDS pipe for those airlines that aren’t NDC,”
said Hamer.
Getting those
pieces to talk together creates challenges – how do you account for it in the
mid- and back office, how do you train agents for it and who would service the
bookings? With NDC, the airline technically could service the booking, but that
wasn’t the experience Visa wanted for the traveller, plus the company wanted
that data and control to stay with the agency of record. Those roles and
responsibilities had to be clearly delineated.
“We needed to make sure we got clarity on how that PNR and
the reservation flows through the system, that we don't lose control and, quite
frankly, that we continue to put the onus on the TMC in terms of being there and
being able to service the booking amidst any potential disruption,” said
Vournakis.
“The OBT had to make some critical path changes. The agency
had to change mid- and back-office functions. At United, we had to build some
redundancy for redundancies,” said Toth, referencing a series of data feeds,
specifically for risk management, that were critical for ensuring duty of care.
Unused ticket processes also needed to join up with the agency.
D’Astolfo characterised some of these calls as “grindingly
laborious,” noting it would have been easy for Hamer to let go of some details
and fall back on traditional processes.
“It’s been a long process, but I think it's uncovered a
bunch of learnings, and Kim has been willing to lead the way,” D’Astolfo said. “We
still have some issues because the content is not coming from a traditional
source, so we all had to sit there and work through how the TMC will see it and
service it. It’s not perfect right now, but we want to make sure we get it
right.”
“She’s pushed everyone really hard,” he added. Vournakis and
Toth both used the word “uncompromising” to describe Hamer’s approach.
Every collaborator also said Hamer has been willing to dig
in and do whatever is necessary on the Visa side to drive the vision.
“Kim has maintained
a strong sense of urgency in how we move this forward,” said Vournakis. “But
she's also been willing to work with us in terms of saying, ‘Hey, I recognise
this is new. I recognise that this requires development’.”
Toth echoed that statement. “As a partner she understands – do
we have the right resources lined up? Is there work we didn't understand? Do we
have that work properly prioritised? Where else can Visa help?”
Connecting
all the dots …not just NDC
Today, Hamer is negotiating unique corporate bundles for
Visa travellers based on their United loyalty status. “I don’t need to negotiate
an Economy Plus seat for a 1K Mileage Plus member because that comes with their
status,” said Hamer.
“But I do want to negotiate that for my travellers who are
Premier members, say, who are flying San Francisco to New York. I want that
choice presented to them and to be clearly in policy for them in the booking
tool so they know Visa is adding value to their experience.”
The fares returned for air search on United will differ from
traveller to traveller. While that now happens by design, Hamer has got ahead of the confusion it might cause – particularly for travel bookers, who are
most likely to notice and remark on what could appear to be pricing or content
“discrepancies” among different travellers.
“She set up these training sessions because she wanted travel
bookers to be super educated on the Mileage Plus element, because there’s going
to be different content returned depending on that [status],” said Toth. “Travellers
also need to know that the online booking tool will look different and that
they can self-serve some new things in that environment, so she’s put a lot of
effort into that change-management piece internally as well.”
Only United content is tailored for Visa through
Travelfusion pipes right now. Hamer is using the carrier’s new customised
contracting model and was one of the beta customers for that rollout. But Hamer
doesn’t plan to stop with a single carrier for her NDC programme model.
“United is a preferred partner for us for a number of
reasons, and it made a lot of sense for us to start there,” Hamer said. “The
airlines are in various stages with NDC themselves, so we have to go where
capabilities are… but we have several strategic partners on our list after
United that we will definitely pursue.”
Hamer’s
vision for a user-centered programme has not just impacted where and how the Visa
travel programme sources and presents content. It has changed how she is able to promote
travel policies as a choice for Visa travellers, how Visa travellers now pay and
report on their travel expenses, and how she has configured CWT’s service
delivery and commercial agreement with Visa. It also includes some automation
elements like self-service ticket exchanges within the OBT that have been “hugely
important,” according to Hamer and Vournakis, to alleviate certain calls to the
agency.
Still, agency
service is central to delivering Visa’s programme, and has been expanded in its new configuration. “We now have 24/7 service delivery,” Hamer said,
eliminating any service or pricing differentials between on-hours and off-hours
support, globally. She also hammered out a subscription model fee with CWT,
eliminating the need for travellers to understand or file TMC fee-related
expense reports back to the organisation. “That’s really confusing for
travellers and doesn’t fit with our simplification goals,” she said.
With
subscription pricing, all TMC fees are funneled away from individual travellers
for central payment. Vournakis said the structure eliminates the “grunt work”
of reconciliation for Visa and puts the onus back on the TMC, “which is
squarely where it belongs,” he said, to simplify invoicing and do it in one
country with one currency. “We want to remove what could be white noise within
a global programme.”
Asked about
transparency for what the client pays for within a subscription fee, Vournakis
said, “We can't get into that kind of a relationship if we don't provide
maximum clarity back to the corporate on what our costs are in the system, how
we get to pricing… and our expected margins on the deal.” He also noted that,
with a transparent relationship, the subscription fee could evolve over time
based on multiple variables like volume or complexity.
Managing transformation
“We knew we had a lot of room for change; our travel programme
was OK, but we didn’t really know what great looked like,” said Visa VP of
global strategic sourcing Mithun Sharma, who was part of the leadership team
that hired Hamer in 2020 to lead that makeover.
“We started looking at all the
new technology that was popping up, the different types of APIs and linkages
possible between third-party systems, and we realised we had an opportunity to
really change that employee experience around travel. It needed to be faster;
it needed to be easier and employees could be more productive. That's what we
brought Kim in to do – to define what ‘great’ looks like.”
Managing transformation during the Covid-19 pandemic had
both pros and cons – with periods “where it took us longer to get from point A to
point B,” said Hamer. “But it also helped because it gave us time to review all
the tools and processes, and even with Covid, there were technology
advancements during that quiet period in the industry, and we were able to take
advantage of it.”
Emerging from the pandemic with a new travel programme and
platform in 2022 has been a bonus, said Hamer, with employees open to change,
especially since Hamer and her team have been diligent in bringing users into
the process.
“It’s all been about that listening. Listening to your
people listening to your employees, hearing what they want,” said Hamer. And
while the result isn’t perfection – the project has run into some gaps with split
ticketing, for example, that the team continues to work through – the
deliverables so far have been meaningful. “It’s all about individual steps
toward delivering the right experience.”
Hamer is forthcoming about the fact that she was flying
under the radar with Visa’s travel programme transformation. “I’m not a person
who really likes to draw a lot of attention,” she said. But she hopes the work
she has done can be an example for the industry.
“If you think about how the industry is behaving today and
the challenges that we're faced with from a staffing perspective, we need to
find ways to better automate systems and technology,” she said. “We want to
create more avenues to relevant content and personalisation. NDC is one of
those avenues, so I hope what we’ve achieved here can drive the industry
forward in a positive way.”