Project Unite Member Update

Dear GBTA Member,

As you might recall, last year GBTA purchased certain assets of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) during their bankruptcy process.  We then embarked on Project Unite as a way to bring together those ACTE assets into GBTA so that we can offer you the best corporate travel education and programming.

After a global survey, numerous hours of global conference calls and individual phone calls, along with many emails that provided very insightful details into the global business travel community, we are ready to transition Project Unite from the fact-gathering stage to the review and execution stages.

There are many takeaways and great ideas from the fact-gathering stage that will ensure that GBTA is incorporating the key components of ACTE to create a lasting, positive impact on our members.  For example, we learned that:

• Diversity means many things: Members seek research and education that represents the diversity of regions along with diverse information sorted by relevance toward travel program maturity, experience of the member/participant, and various industry verticals
• Putting the “G” into GBTA: GBTA Research needs more consistency and depth to give access to global, regional, and country results for stronger benchmarking and relevance
• Multi-channel learning: Members and attendees are looking for new/many ways to learn and consume information through multiple channels
• Advocacy: Increase GBTA advocacy efforts as the voice of business travel with governments and others, especially now around the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on economies and business
• Networking: Members are looking for better platforms from GBTA to drive more engagement amongst their peers and industry colleagues – digital, in particular.

In fact, your feedback has already resulted in the evolution of the education planning process for the GBTA 2021 European Conferences, to include more consultation and cross committee collaboration.  This collaboration, learning from what had been the structure at ACTE, will provide curation input on topics that need to be discussed at the conferences and assist in sourcing speakers.

Now we will enter the review and execution stages of Project Unite, where Suzanne Neufang, GBTA CEO, and the GBTA team, will analyze the ideas from an implementation, impact to members, and budget perspective and then design an execution schedule.

At this point, we would like to thank so many around the world for their support and dedication to making this fact-gathering stage extremely successful.  As we move into the other stages, please know that GBTA will be reaching back out to members as additional information is needed. We look forward to your continuing support and engagement.

It has been our honor to work with so many on making GBTA stronger.  Thank you.

Regards,

Project Unite Co-Chairs

Christle Johnson and Greeley Koch