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Nikki Parsons is chair of the UK’s Institute of Travel
Management and global director for travel at Netherlands-based Arcadis. Her
career began at STA Travel before stints with travel management companies
HRG and American Express Global Business Travel. Parsons then moved over to the
buyer side with roles at Merrill Lynch, Standard Bank, Citi and AIG which
included positions in Singapore and New York. She returned to the UK and joined
Arcadis in spring 2020.
After six years as a board member of the UK’s Institute of
Travel Management, Nikki Parsons stepped into the lead role as chair in 2023, juggling
all that it entails alongside her day job as global travel and meetings manager
at design, engineering and consultancy company Arcadis.
“The opportunity came at the right time for me,” says
Parsons, who embraces the challenge of “keeping all the plates spinning”. She continues: “You give absolutely whatever time you can
and that will ebb and flow as it does for any of us through our working lives.
I’m here to make sure the board’s run effectively and to represent ITM publicly
and the voice of buyers.”
That can mean having challenging conversations with travel
suppliers. “We have an opportunity to aggregate and amplify the issues that travel
managers are dealing with. With perhaps fewer account managers within the supply
community… it becomes even more important that ITM gets that feedback from
multiple buyers and amplifies their message.”
In 2023, content fragmentation and Ryanair’s facial recognition
technology were two developments which saw ITM take action, publicly challenging
the latter and forming a taskforce to “keep the conversation going” around New
Distribution Capability.
“NDC is not necessarily going to have the same impact on all
travel programmes – having that low fare content might not be critical for you –
but it continues to be a challenge for some until all the pathways and plumbing
sorts itself out,” says Parsons.
“Unless you have the scope
within your programme and your team to re-engineer it yourself, which some
programmes will have, you will need to look to your travel management
company to help you. But there are also new entrants in the market who
potentially will have alternative solutions too.”
But Parsons is
pragmatic, suggesting that content fragmentation is not a new development. “We’ve
been talking about this in Europe ever since the dawn of low-cost carriers and
getting access to that content, and understanding exactly what our travellers
are buying in an unbundled marketplace has been a challenge for us for a long time,
so I think to a certain extent it just comes with a new name and there’s other
benefits that might come further down the line.”
The wider landscape in which
travel managers operate is more challenging, Parsons believes, pointing to
geopolitical unrest, political change, legislation and regulation, economic
uncertainty, rising costs, environmental issues and the evolving potential of
AI in travel management. “They’re all pressing down on as at the moment,” she
says.
I feel different as a travel manager post-pandemic and my company expects different things of me. I think that’s why we as the ITM board have to think about our strategy and keep evolving it
“There’s been such an
evolution of the travel manager role since I started in it arguably not that
long ago. We were a profit centre and then we had to find our way as a really
well managed and robust cost centre within an organisation. And now we’ve got
this next iteration where we are going to have to be so much more to a business
and all of its strategic objectives.”
She continues: “I feel
different as a travel manager post-pandemic and my company expects different
things of me. I think that’s why we as the ITM board have to think about our
strategy and keep evolving it. Are we where we need to be? Are we offering what
our members need? We just need to continue to ask ourselves that question and
keep evolving. In the latter half of last year, we began working on refining ITM’s strategy, defining critical initiatives to drive that evolution, and letting the membership know what we are doing.”
Parsons joined Arcadis in
2020 as the company’s first full-time travel manager and has spent her time
there since “designing a new operating model”. That included, in 2023, the
consolidation of ten TMCs globally to one. “For a small team ten TMCs was tricky to
manage so it was a natural next step… we needed to just have a bit more
standardisation. It had been challenging to do anything in a uniform way and that
became abundantly clear as we went through Covid. We needed to do things consistently
globally to make sure we had that common duty of care.”
Topics specific to her
travel manager role that are demanding her time include the Posted Workers Directive (PWD) and Payment Services
Directive (PSD), while the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) “is
going to have a big impact even if you’re not registered in the EU. Some
companies are going to have a really big wake-up call in 2024.”
While business travel
activity’s contribution to Scope 3 emissions will vary from company to company,
Parsons says there is an opportunity “to have a seat at the table, understand
what it [CSRD] means for your company, and then provide the information that is
going to help sustainability teams make informed decisions”.
Parsons describes the Arcadis
travel programme as mid-market and multinational and, being headquartered in
Amsterdam, views rail travel as a key means of reducing its environmental impact. “It’s not a mandate, but we
encourage people travelling less than 700km to take the train rather than fly,”
she says, noting that for travel between the UK and Netherlands, booking trips with Eurostar
is an expectation.
“We have a lot of travel
between certain origins and destinations within Europe so we have to make sure
travellers are aware that rail is an option, especially cross-border. We would
love for the technology to catch up so that the air to rail switch sell becomes
even easier. We know there is also the interconnectivity challenge on the
European rail piece but there’s a lot of great work going on by the European
Union to try and stitch that together.”
Parsons expects the seamless movement
of people across borders to be another hot topic in the year ahead as the UK accelerates the roll-out of its Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) scheme for visitors not
requiring a visa while the EU works towards implementing its Entry-Exit System
(due to commence in the second half of 2024) and related European Travel
Information and Authorisation System (starting mid-2025), a similar concept to
the UK’s ETA scheme.
“Those will be on the agenda in 2024 but since
they’re similar to the US ESTA system it shouldn’t be too problematic,” says Parsons. “The
challenge will be raising awareness among business travellers who for a very long
time have been used to having that freedom of movement. As a Dutch company with
a lot of travel to and from the UK, we need to make sure we understand exactly
what is going to be implemented in both directions and to make sure that
information is available at the time of booking in OBTs because they are our shop
window.”
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