As the former managing director of German payment provider
AirPlus International, Patrick Diemer is no stranger to regulatory hurdles. He
was the voice of the corporate payments industry in 2017 when strong customer
authentication threatened corporate travel processes, and under his leadership
the industry prevailed with regulators to secure an exemption to certain SCA
rules for corporate payments. In 2022, now gone from AirPlus, Diemer again emerged
as a leading voice of Europe’s managed travel industry as the founding chairman
of a new industry lobbying group, BT4Europe, whose mission is to represent the
European managed travel buyer to legislators in Brussels.
BT4Europe, which formed in February, brought together 13
disparate buyer associations in Europe to form a single representative voice
for the European managed travel community of buyers to educate legislators on
the needs and complexities of business travel. The organization’s founding
members are ABTA (Austria), AEGVE (Spain), AITMM (Italy), AFTM (France), ASTM
(Switzerland), BATM (Belgium), CORTAS (The Netherlands), DBTA (Denmark), FBTA
(Finland), NATM (The Netherlands), NBTA (Norway), SBTA (Sweden) and VDR
(Germany).
BT4Europe’s key mission is to highlight to the managed
travel industry how EU legislation will impact critical processes and common
goals for travel managers and their companies. Diemer has called out in public
forums a number of industry challenges that the group would like to address,
including labor shortages and car rental shortages, but has focused the group
on two major issues for the near term: the Multimodal Digital Mobility Services
(MDMS) proposal and the Count Emissions EU initiative.
While the group has voiced support for both initiatives, it
is concerned in both cases about the lack of capability in corporate booking
tools to deliver the content required to support them. For MDMS, the group may
be looking for allowances or rollout extensions for rail content to be made
fully available in corporate booking systems. While the EU government wants to
push travelers to train for short-haul travel, it can become challenging to
impossible for the corporate traveler to use sanctioned booking systems to
coordinate and secure cross-border journeys.
For Count Emissions EU, BT4Europe wants to ensure the
proposals cover corporate booking tools, not only to ensure required standardized
sustainability metrics are reported to governments but also so standardized
metrics are presented internally for efficient and effective corporate
decision-making, including travel, in real time.
Diemer already has wielded his influence in uniting the
BT4Europe organization on a consensus platform. It remains to be seen how
strong the group’s voice will be in Brussels. Where Diemer is concerned,
Europe’s managed travel industry is hoping past is prologue.