About
Over 30 years in corporate travel, on both sides of the table.
I'm Karen McKenna. WEST10 is my practice, and its argument comes out of what I have watched happen in this industry for a very long time.
I spent the first decade of my career selling for three of the largest travel management companies in the world — all three now part of American Express Global Business Travel. I closed and implemented a €600 million EMEA programme and opened a hundred-person multilingual service centre in Brussels.
Then I went and built things.
2004 — 2006
ETABID, and what it taught me
Writing then as Karen McGee, I founded ETABID — the first online sourcing platform the corporate travel industry had. Siemens was the launch customer. Kellogg's, Investec, ITV, PwC, Morgan Stanley, Smith & Nephew and Adidas followed. The world's ten largest travel management companies responded through it. It was shortlisted for the Business Travel Show Innovation Award and the Business Travel World Product Award in 2005, and acquired by Lanyon in 2006.
It did exactly what I built it to do. Buyers ran sourcing faster. Suppliers responded in a format that could actually be compared. Both sides liked it.
What no software could reach was the problem sitting upstream of it. Organisations still went to market without ever establishing what was wrong. They still received proposals shaped by whatever questions they happened to ask. They still, very often, reappointed the incumbent and wondered why nothing had changed.
That is not an argument against tenders. Some programmes need one. It is an argument for knowing what problem you are solving before you spend nine months solving something else — and it is why WEST10 does not run tenders for the clients it advises.
2010 — 2023
Teaching it, which is how you find out whether you understand it
A consultancy advising FTSE 150 and Fortune 500 buyers, which I sold in 2010. Workshops built with American Express, British Airways, HRS and Amadeus, on duty of care, travel risk, sustainability, hotel programme management, policy, bid management and technology. Years training agency owners for IATA across China, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States. Then Travilearn, an e-learning platform for travel professionals, and the Diploma in Corporate Travel Management certified by the Business Travel Association.
Training has an uncomfortable discipline to it. You cannot teach a process you only half understand, and a room full of experienced travel managers will find the gap in about ninety seconds. A great deal of what WEST10 now argues was worked out in front of those rooms rather than in a report.
How I work
Evidence over assertion
If the data supports a conclusion, I will say so plainly. If it does not, I will say that too, rather than dressing an opinion up as a finding. Travel programmes are full of numbers that mean less than they appear to, and a good deal of my value is in knowing which ones.
I am also researching and writing about how corporate travel programmes are commercially structured — TMC economics, booking technology, supplier arrangements, payment and data. That work informs everything WEST10 does, and it is published as it goes.
If any of this sounds like your programme, let's talk.
Speak to Karen →