In The Big Chair - Michelle McKinney Frymire of CWT

You’ve just passed your six-month anniversary as CEO. What has been most surprising in your time on the job? And what has been the most challenging?

There have been lots of things that were both surprising in a positive way but also surprising in terms of challenging. On a positive note I can’t tell you how surprising and yet meaningful to me it has been to have so much positive feedback, both internally and externally, as the first woman to be a CEO in this space. As a company that has 70% of our employees women, the notes of support and congratulations that I’ve received and continue to receive have been super positive.

On the challenging side, this is a challenging time for our industry. And the piece that has been slightly more challenging than I expected is just making sure I’m allocating my time where it needs to go. For us there’s heavy lifting we’ve been doing securing our financial future but also ensuring our team has the right resources, that we’re allocating capital to the right initiatives and that we’re thinking long-term about the mission we have. And I’m always thinking, am I allocating time the right way and making sure I’m looking forward and giving the right time to the right activities?

Where do you see opportunities for growth?

The first and highest best opportunity is the investments we’re going to be making in technology and in our product. We have a significant investment plan ahead of us and making sure we are prioritizing not just the right things but the sequencing of those is so critical. There are elements to the MyCWT app that we want to make sure we get in the right order, particularly driven by the needs and desires of our clients.

There are elements around the sustainability. We continue to focus on RoomIt and development there, we continue to focus on our MyCWT China offering, we continue to focus on innovative developments as well. Thinking about the sequencing and planning of those is a huge priority for us. While we are making a big investment, it’s important that we are making it at the right time and in the right places.

What are one or two of the main aspects of business travel that still need to be fixed or updated?

As people get back to travel, they also realize the things about travel that are really painful. The in-airport experience, the time it takes to go from curb to the gate, is still really long. It can be really painful and really unpredictable. It’s an area that is so ripe for the incredible technology innovations that we are seeing in that space. You think about facial recognition, AI and all the amazing technology that can come to bear on that. I think as people return to travel, and we see this massive rise in the use of technology around every kind of business, it’s a place and part of travel that will really benefit from the technology innovation that is happening.

And then I think the booking experience itself is so important to travelers. Travelers and travel arrangers want it to be easy. They want to have all the information they need right at their hands. And that set of information is growing every day - information about sustainability, information about safety and health, information about requirements. That’s part of where we are excited about our technology investment is how we be a part of elevating that experience.

What emerging technologies or solutions interest you the most right now? 

AI, blockchain, machine learning, they all have a place in the ecosystem. The way they get deployed is what excites me the most, if you think about that true omnichannel experience and our ability to use something like AI and machine learning to make our messaging applications even more effective for travelers. I love, love this idea of how people can make their work day more efficient using messaging on our platform. We have over a thousand clients using messaging.

I think about myself... I’m going from meeting to meeting... and I realize that my day is changing and that my four o’clock flight could be a two o’clock flight or maybe it needs to be a six o’clock flight. And how easy it is to go through messaging and say I need to change my outbound flight today and how the technology we deploy can know instantly know who I am, where I am, what trip I’m on and immediately use that to help me change my day with me expending less than 60 seconds of effort. Using technology to do those things is really going to bring a much different experience to the traveler. 

What’s your view on newer entrants in the TMC space such as TripActions and Travelperk – what can legacy players, like CWT and others, learn from them? And what can they learn from you? 

What they can learn from us is that this is in fact people plus technology. It’s not technology in all capitals and people in lowercase. It’s capital T and capital P. This business is a service business, and it requires great technology backed by great people. On flip side I think what we have learned and continue to discover is our ability to accelerate innovation, to move nimbly, to implement things quickly, to ensure that we are adopting and incorporating startup technologies in our own technology set.

I love the pace at which development is happening in our business. It’s exciting to see how rapidly we are evolving. And I’m excited for CWT about how we can accelerate our own brand of innovation that we are bringing and the investments we are making in accelerating innovation. But in the end, this is a people business ... and it is backed by the power of people, whether it is people developing technology, people servicing clients, people servicing travelers – it is ultimately a people-plus-technology business. 

Speaking of people, CWT like many other companies in travel reduced or modified staffing due to the pandemic. As the recovery continues, how are your positioning the company to have appropriate staffing to handle the needs of clients?

I am super excited to see the recovery that is happening. Even in the last six to eight weeks, it’s been notable ... and we are all excited to be on the road ourselves. As it relates to people, that has been one of the real benefits of these part-time working programs that we’ve put in place. As volumes come back, we have someone working one to two days a week, we are able to very quickly ramp them up to three to four days a week in response to volumes. It also allows us to adjust our expenses to the fluctuations in volumes. 

There are also places where we are absolutely out in the market hiring. You look at our global hubs that we operate, you look at some of our technology organizations. We have hundreds of jobs that are posted, and we are seeing real success about getting people excited about coming back to travel and being part of travel and that’s in part because of the strong future we have ahead of us.

Can you briefly outline your projections for recovery for CWT in terms of returning to 2019 levels. And how do those projections and the financial restructuring CWT announced in September impact your strategies moving forward? 

We like everyone else think recovery is multi-year journey. I’ve looked at probably 50 different iterations of projections for business travel and none show next year at 100%. We also know there’s a lot of different perspectives that you have to consider. The recovery is highly disparate, it’s very different by country around the world.

We take into account who are our clients and how are they thinking about returning to travel. We’ve taken into account who are our largest suppliers and how they are thinking about it. In general our view of recovery that we took for purposes of re-capitalization was actually a fairly conservative one. We wanted to ensure the company was tremendously financially strong as we go through that journey.

On the other hand, as we are experiencing recovery, and it’s above our somewhat conservative projections, we are also constantly rethinking the next three months and six months to make sure we are staffed, we’re ready to service our clients, we know who is returning to work and to travel.

It is a very fluid process for us, but I think I, like most people in the industry, see a strong return to travel happening today, with likely to be some pause on that in the winter holiday period because people do want to reconnect with family and friends. And then a really optimistic expectation for early 2022. I think we’ll see strong recovery. I do think it will differ by industry and by geography ... but when I think about the benchmarks around 2022, we certainly think that where we are today says that you could see 60 to 70% of 2019 levels in 2022, and then beyond that I do think it will recover.

Why hasn’t NDC been the distribution panacea that it was portrayed to be for TMCs and airlines? What needs to happen? 

If you ask 50 travel people what NDC is you get 60 different answers. That fundamentally is at the root of why it’s not a panacea – because there’s no one definition of what it is, how to do it, how to make it work. And that’s why I think it still remains this illusive goal for many of us around how we make it work. I’m excited about the things we are doing in this space and our ability to help guide toward aggregating content in different ways and providing that harmonized content to clients.

But I do think its biggest challenge is the disparity of just the definition of what it is and how people are going about it. And that’s not uncommon in the early stages of disruptive technology, for there to be different views and different approaches. Over time those will coalesce around certain things that seem to work, and I think it will gain traction ... I think it will flourish. We have a fantastic team focused on NDC ... and the work we are doing with suppliers and clients and the distribution system on it is exciting, but I do think it still needs a bit more definition and perhaps a refinement and alignment on how do we get there collectively.

I understand CWT will soon be announcing some goals related to sustainability. What role can a company like CWT play in helping the industry make progress in this area? 

I think of sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion, social justice – I think about these topics in a concentric circle model. The center of the circle is that we have to do what we do the right way. Doing the right thing for the right reasons at the right time. But more importantly, just like when you throw a rock into a pond and the circles ripple and get bigger over time, we have the ability to impact beyond that.

We can bring innovative thinking about sustainability in a travel program to thousands of clients. We can benchmark what the biggest trends are and what the best practices are and spread those ... to our other clients. We can help people integrate technology around sustainability into things like the booking practice, the pre-trip approval.

To me it’s a really exciting place to be. But doing that for your clients means starting at home. And making sure that we are doing the right things and that we are focused inwardly on being the right part of that ecosystem. It’s more exciting to multiply your impact in a big way because you can then bring to clients and connect client who can work together on things.

You are one of the few women leading a major brand in the travel industry. What will it take to get more diversity in the C-suite? 

What will work there is going to work everywhere. For the circle to be larger, everyone who is in the circle has to be willing to bring more people who are different than them into the circle. It’s fundamentally that simple. Whether you look at the board room, the C-suite, the executive ranks, middle management or your employee base, we have to focus on bringing people into the circle at every level who are different than us - different backgrounds, different colors, different religions, different belief systems, different ways of thinking. It’s all tremendously important.

The world is an incredibly diverse, wonderful place, and when we ourselves look like the world – and that means not just in your employee base but in your client base, your supplier base, in your executive ranks, in your board room -then we will be more successful in building a better CWT for the world. We have made tremendous progress in the C-suite and the board room but we have way more progress to go. I think every company around the world has a role to play in this, because it’s only collectively we can make progress we need and the pace of progress has to increase. It cannot take 100 years to achieve the kind of diversity we need and that is reflected in the world.

You’ve had a broad range of experience in your career, including both airlines and hospitality brands. What have you learned from those that is applicable for you now? 

One of the things I was really fortunate to experience early and often very frequently is companies going through transformation. I worked at Delta right after 9/11. I worked at companies post the financial crisis. I worked at companies in high, uber-growth periods. I worked at companies that were highly acquisitive - in the span of three years we bought 50 to 60 companies at one of my experiences. And every day I find myself drawing on those experiences of how did we manage through transformation, how did we make transformation our own, how did we make transformation work for our company and how did we build a culture within that company where transformation and innovation was part of our DNA. So I feel really fortunate I get to draw on those experiences every day. 

What advice do you have for young people just entering the travel industry?

I think my biggest piece of advice is stick with it. It’s worth it. It’s a fantastic business. It’s exciting. It’s interesting. Your experiences will be varied. The places it will take you will be robustly enriching to your life and your world view. Don’t give up on travel just because it goes through hard times. Right now specifically I think it’s a fantastic place to go to work. What I saw after last two seismic crises that impacted travel ... was incredible growth opportunities. When I worked in those businesses post-those crises, I was presented with so many opportunities, opportunities to have an impact, opportunities to grow, opportunities to gain new experiences and that is true any time a business is going through transformation or high growth.