Integrated travel and meetings is complex, but ITM also promises sizable savings for corporate travel programs. The key to getting started lies in asking—and answering—the right questions, Advito’s George Odom told Business Travel News in a recent interview.
“You look at policy, you look at structure, you look at data. It’s really important to get your data and your reporting, and to be able to bring that together,” said Odom, who in July returned to Advito, the consulting arm of BCD Travel, to lead its integrated travel and meetings practice.
From a corporate viewpoint, “you need to look at what’s important. Is it savings? It is service? Is meetings an investment or an expense? You’re going to operate differently depending how you answer those questions,” he told BTN. “The first step is to understand what you’re trying to solve and where you are on that path.”
Odom’s career in business travel spans more than three decades and includes a previous stop at Advito, as well as tenures in the travel programs of Hewlett-Packard Co. and Eli Lilly and Co. He’s also a member of the Global Business Travel Association’s Groups and Meetings Committee.
Today, Odom, an Advito principal, is focused on helping clients go from talking about integrating travel and meetings to acting on it. He talked with BTN about the potential of a good idea that’s largely gone untapped. Most in the industry see the benefits ITM could bring, he said, but “there are very few who have actually done it.”