BTN Names McKinsey & Co.’s Jamie Stewart 2025 Travel Manager of the Year

On Wednesday evening at The Parlur on the Sheraton Denver Downtown
Business Travel News hosted the forty first
Annual Travel Manager of the Year and Best Practitioners awards and reception
with greater than 300 of the business’s prime company journey and procurement
professionals in attendance. Award recipients had been chosen by BTN editors from
nominations submitted by the business. BTN Editorial Director Elizabeth West
introduced the winners, recognizing McKinsey & Company’s director of journey
and occasions know-how Jamie Stewart because the 2025 Travel Manager of the Year. BTN named 5 2025 Travel
Management Best Practitioners: Chevron’s Alicia King, Ciena’s Fazal Choksi, Pretium’s
Maria Chevalier, Salesforce’s Ryan Pierce and Zillow’s Tami Pharr.

The reception was sponsored by Accor, Air Canada, American Express Global Business Travel, Cvent,
Marriott Bonvoy and United for Business.

BTN’s 2025 Travel Manager of the Year

McKinsey & Company’s Jamie Stewart in
the previous 18 months introduced AI-powered, giant language mannequin reserving know-how into
present Slack workflows for McKinsey & Co. vacationers and journey arrangers.
He labored over the previous three years with revolutionary startup firm Skylink as
the corporate’s first giant enterprise buyer, collaborating with the
AI-innovator to advance its product to serve a posh journey program at scale
whereas bringing an intuitive and seamless reserving course of to McKinsey vacationers
in a approach that additionally superior efficiencies and journey compliance measures.

Stewart not solely labored with Skylink however
additionally essentially introduced American Express Global Business Travel into the innovation
combine, integrating company content material—at present, content material supplied solely by the Sabre
GDS, however inside weeks to incorporate Amadeus content material as properly in McKinsey’s rollout of
the reserving workflow to Europe—into the Skylink instruments. With Amex GBT in a position to
service all bookings made via the AI instruments when self-service automation isn’t
potential.

For each search initiated within the Slack
workflow, McKinsey has configured the instruments to return three air itinerary choices
based mostly not solely on firm coverage but in addition making an allowance for the traveler’s
profile, loyalty affinities and reserving historical past. The choices returned clearly
be aware which is taken into account the bottom logical fare choice, immediate the consumer for
worldwide itineraries to e book roundtrip fares as a substitute of one-way choices
and all the time to ask the consumer to e book a lodge inside the similar workflow. While
bookers have the leeway to say no these suggestions—in addition to the choice
to default to conventional Concur on-line reserving or to Amex GBT-aided company
bookings—McKinsey has seen a 35 % shift in Skylink customers in lodge
attachment charges and 40 % shift in Skylink customers towards reserving
worldwide spherical journeys.

The firm has seen traveler reserving instances
dramatically lower from a mean of between 10 to fifteen minutes per reserving
to 99 seconds. Travelers with repeat journeys are ready inside the Skylink-Slack
workflow to duplicate itineraries sequentially for a number of weeks working by
merely asking Skylink to repeat the reserving for a given length. Project codes
enable the Skylink reserving software to allocate journey bills accordingly.

Stewart started piloting the Skylink-Slack-Amex
GBT-powered workflow in October 2024, launched it formally in North America in
April and can start rolling it out to McKinsey’s Europe-based vacationers in a
matter of weeks. McKinsey has achieved a 96 % satisfaction charge for the
new workflow amongst present customers.

2025 BTN Best Practitioners

Who: Alicia King Chevron Global Category
Manager Air, Ground and Travel Analytics
What: For serving because the journey level in Chevron’s
complicated, best-in-class security and safety program that manages traveler and
asset security in a number of the most intricate and geopolitically risky areas
of the globe. King has leveraged the deep airline, airport and different transportation-oriented
relationships she established within the area significantly in the course of the Covid-19
period to handle security, evacuations and repatriations out and in of the Middle
East as tensions within the area have been on the rise and surged into lively
battle. BTN acknowledges the agility of King’s program and transportation
suppliers to react and reply rapidly and successfully.

Who: Fazal Choksi, Ciena Director Indirect
Procurement
What: Ciena was the primary giant shopper of the
first TMC to make use of Spotnana as its know-how stack. Choksi has been instrumental
in collaborating with Solutions Travel’s Mark Walton in addition to Spotnana
know-how suppliers Sarosh Waghmar and Steve Singh in stress testing the
know-how in environments exterior of Spotnana’s unique scope of direct
shoppers. The Ciena program took daring steps to scale new know-how options, service and
geographic attain. Choksi’s
collaborative work has been instrumental on this growth.

Who: Maria Chevalier, Pretium Global
Director Travel & Expense
What: For making the enterprise case for and
initiating modern information administration practices within the SME market that show
how fast-growth firms can’t solely mannequin historic information, however body their
future trajectories to attain direct-negotiated reductions and relationships
with journey suppliers. Chevalier consolidated information throughout 18 sources together with her
companion Cornerstone and utilized that throughout the Pretium portfolio of firms
to safe custom-made, value-driven negotiated offers with this information strategy
throughout a time when small and midsize firms are extra usually being delivered
“off-the-shelf” applications from suppliers.

Who: Ryan Pierce, Salesforce Sr. Travel
Manager AMER/JAPAC
What: Working solely with inside programs, Pierce created an
AI-powered Salesforce journey chatbot that solutions and surfaces its sources to reply
to consumer questions in regards to the journey program, journey suppliers, company
agreements and provide journey suggestions. It makes use of solely inside Salesforce
sources to make sure program containment and compliance. An further nomination
for Pierce known as out his work within the India market establishing a visa and journey
paperwork portal that eases difficult processes for vacationers. The subsequent
era of this portal will marry Pierce’s AI work together with his journey paperwork
work and develop that to further geographies. Pierce has established a
roadmap for the AI work to incorporate agentic processes.

Who: Tami Pharr, Zillow Corporate Travel
Program Manager
What: For shifting Zillow to an open platform TMC
companion and enabling an surroundings that supported a brand new journey technique for a
firm that had gone absolutely distant. The firm had been challenged to handle its
core culture-building journey program that had grown to incorporate 300 to 400 “ZRetreats”
that enabled collaboration amongst one hundred pc of Zillow staff—all of which
had been now company vacationers. Pharr moved lodge agreements to a room block technique
leveraging Hubli, fairly than counting on a transient journey technique, and has
saved the corporate greater than 15 % throughout two-thirds of its whole journey
finances. Pharr additionally related Hubli tech into Zillow’s new journey administration
platform, and Zillow developed what known as a “hotel & flight tracker”
that Hubli is now recreating into its personal software to allow for different shoppers.