Cindy Heston

Anthem director of travel and events and 2016 Business Travel Hall of Fame inductee Cindy Heston is a veteran travel management practitioner renowned for her innovations with data and her penchant for forging partner relationships that bring new solutions to the industry. These days, her focus is on travel program customization and loyalty and on making sure Anthem travelers feel the value of the travel program—not just for the company, but also personally. 

BTN: How did you get started with travel management? It seems like you have been making appearances on the front page of BTN since the beginning of your career.

Heston: Actually I didn't want to go into travel management at all. I worked in airline sales and I loved it. It was what I believed was the best job in the world. It was so fun working with travel agents, working with corporates. It was the beginning of working with corporate accounts from a travel management standpoint. One of my corporate accounts was very enthusiastic about me interviewing to come to work for them. I continually said, "No, I really am happy, I love airlines.” It took convincing from my own father to [go on the interview]. So I did talk to them, I'd do whatever my father told me.

BTN: Data has always been a strong suit for you, and you consistently have led the industry innovating with data. How did you find that niche and develop it to benefit your travel program?

Heston: I'd used data a lot on the agency side with MIDT reports the global distribution systems sold to the airline. We had a lot of data on each account as to how they were performing compared to [how] we felt they should be performing. Coming onto the corporate side, I had a great handle on the agency side of [the] business and then the airline side of business as far as what could be done on a corporate side as far as agency sales, support and service. That's immediately where I focused, looking at how [I could] bring the best value back to the organization and then very slowly but surely picking up all the other pieces of travel management.

Using the data in the beginning was important as far as understanding how to improve the servicing from an airline to a customer. When I [got] on the customer side, I understood the importance of revenue share and goals and market statistics as far as origination and destination markets. I immediately went to the agency and said, "I want to see every top market, I want to know what is the percentage of share, how can I shift that share based on volume, what is the average ticket price?"

BTN: That wasn’t easy information to get to at that point. It must have been a really manual process.

Heston: Back then in the GDS, our negotiated rates were not loaded by ATPCO. I wanted to shift travel behavior and yet it wasn't easy for the travel agency to see that information on their screen unless they put in a format that was exclusive to our account with our pseudo city code. It was a very long format back in the day. [So] we basically ran data spreadsheets for every agent every morning that would run through every class and service. Instead of saying, "Oh, you can have a 30 percent discount," it would be, "No, your fare is $500 versus $800 on carrier B." I encouraged and enforced to the travel agency that I wanted to shift share to the partners that [were] providing a good value back to—at the time, Technicolor—and I wanted to make sure that [agents were] at least giving our travelers the opportunity to buy that.

BTN: You’re known to suppliers for your control of your program, and this has enabled you to negotiate and partner with suppliers in a way that is, often, a level above what your volume alone might “earn.” How do you continue to manage at that level?

Heston: [You have] to be transparent to partners that are very open, and listen. Part of my solution is to find partners that have the leadership from a CEO level, from an executive leadership standpoint, where they have that kind of hunger, where they want to meet and work with corporates and better understand what [they] can do to better partner with you as a company. Through the RFP process, talking to references, understanding how they perform after the deal is signed, [I’m looking for] that beyond contract value from a partner. [I want to know] how we can not only benefit the company but provide them the understanding of a corporate need [for which] they could provide [a solution] that would not only help us but help multiple businesses across the industry.

It's a shared objective for me. I look at our organization, and I'll always say, “This is unique to Anthem. Nobody else is going to want this but us,” and maybe it's something we have to have. [But] we'll [also] partner on things that are industry level [that] every company wants. I always make that distinction with [suppliers] so they understand and can choose whether or not they want to engage or not. If it's something that the industry needs, then it's full-on, let's go and we will work together. Again, through a very painstaking RFP and reference review, [I want to find] the suppliers that are nimble, who are agile, who are hungry and really want to grow and develop a partnership.

BTN: Loyalty is playing a bigger role than ever in managed travel. It’s an obvious consumer strategy, but managed travel has been slow to adopt. How are you trying to change that?

Heston: The mindset of the corporate travel manager initially was based on ROI, period. It was all about negotiating the money and it was all about policy. We thought we could force [travelers] to do what we [wanted] based on the money and based on our policy. Unfortunately, we all bought into it. … It just wasn't something that we ever felt the ability to go beyond. [We needed to ask] what we could do to add value that will help either my customer or bring more value to the airline.

I first saw [this] way back in the beginning when I had negotiated a great [transpacific] contract for our company. Everybody, 90 percent of our business, was on another carrier. The savings were a great differential [but it] wasn't pushing enough [volume to the new contract]. I worked with the carrier to provide a special value: If you went 10 times a year, one of your trips… could be first class. All of a sudden we were over performing on the KPI for that market with that supplier. We went from a 10 percent share to over an 80 percent share just by saying, “Maybe this isn't working just with the money; what can we do for the traveler?" It was this ah-ha moment: If I look at it as a full-scale project, where did we ever get it in our mind that we could forget about our clients?

BTN: Has this transactional mindset had repercussions for managed travel as an industry?

Heston: As an industry we forgot long enough that other businesses came in and started to say, "Well come over here, it's a better value if you come here. Don't stay in your program." Then we had to deal with that from a reactionary standpoint. Now [travel managers are] fighting [for their travelers] to even stay in [the program] because they keep saying, "Well all you've ever played in is money, so I can get better money over here. Now what? Now what, travel manager?" If you play in that I-can-beat-you-by-a-nickel kind of mentality you're never going to win. If you look at it from a fully-fledged, end-to-end travel program [that ensures] you're vetted correctly when you first come on, that you understand the program, that you have the right payment, the platform and that you understand the value of the organization beyond just the money, then you're going to win.