2011 Results

2011 WINNER - European Travel Buyer of the Year

Mette Christensen,

Global Travel Manager, A.P.Moller - Maersk

Mette Christensen is a champion of transparency and partnership.

Her determination and passion convinced a major airline supplier to abandon the tradition of locally fixed pricing for global clients and introduce consistent pricing regardless of the location of the booking. It was for working in partnership to create a truly innovative airline agreement that the judges awarded Mette the coveted accolade of European Travel Buyer of the Year.

Mette is global travel manager for A P Moller – Maersk. It was no mean feat for her and her team to consolidate its travel programme of 50,000 travellers and 140 countries down to two from its previous 170. This consolidation meant that Mette had had to ask many bookers to give up the agency round the corner and move their travel to one of eight central booking hubs situated round the world. With 45% of all air journeys begun in locations outside the company’s home country of Denmark, it was vital that these bookers have access to local content. For Mette the challenge became obtaining that local content at the same price regardless of where the booking was being made.

Travel buyers have long been frustrated by finding that if, for example, one of their travellers is in London and needs to fly from there to Madrid, the price of the ticket is quite different if the booker sits in Frankfurt than if the booker sits in Singapore or, indeed, London.

The practice reflects home and dominant carrier status and how ‘foreign’ carriers always have to offer more competitive outbound fares in non-home markets as most travellers naturally veer towards wanting to fly on the national carrier.

Many managers have gotten round these pricing discrepancies by means such as artificially tricking the computer into thinking bookers are somewhere other than where they physically are, but Mette felt strongly that partnership with suppliers meant transparency and openness on both sides. She wanted fares to be loaded into the GDS for all to be able to access in the normal way regardless of where they sat.

“Savings and transparency are paramount,” she says. “It is important to get consistent data and transparency.
“I can accept that you pay different prices in different countries just as you would for a Macdonalds. What I found difficult was paying a different price for the executive’s travel not because of the journey but because of where the ticket was being booked.”

Mette’s mission was to establish point-of-sale neutral negotiated fares with SAS, a large supplier to Copenhagen- headquartered A P Moller – Maersk.

Many airlines’ global deals are in fact merely an exercise in collating prices from local offices whereas a truly global strategy would look at global volumes. Airlines find this difficult because local offices have their own revenue targets and are often reluctant to give discounts to customers that might deliver large volumes overall and elsewhere but insignificant ones in their countries.

Mette worked with account managers in SAS’s head office in Stockholm. The carrier’s regional managers travelled there to hear her presentation which pointed out how commitment to a global price, regardless of point of booking, would in fact give them more volumes and the strong likelihood of increasing their individual market shares.

Mette was clear in her savings goals and SAS was honest and open about the total bottom-line contribution it needed from A P Moller – Maersk. Agreement with SAS was reached and the company’s negotiated fares are now loaded centrally.

According to Mette, the negotiations were carried out with the goal of not just driving savings but also of enhancing the partnership.

She says the programme has been very successful so she is now discussing such an agreement with other large carriers in markets in which the company does large volumes of travel.

But her challenges will not end there. “This could translate to hotels and I’m planning on doing that next,” she says.

Mette is also looking at consolidating her online booking tool. At present she uses a different tool in every region but believes that now that the process is working well, the time could be right to switch to one supplier.

She is indefatigable – “Yes, I’d do it again and I’d recommend it to others. Get a mandate and engage very early on with your major internal stakeholders. Be open to what your supplier partners are saying. It’s important to sit down with them and talk openly.”

Mette Christensen is a champion of senior sponsorship, mandating, collecting quality data and implementing demand management.

“You must mandate. Know and involve the right people and then deliver.”

And deliver she has done.