Dominic Short is president of the Association
of Swiss Travel Management (ASTM) and CEO of business travel management
consultancy CDABS, specialising in the implementation of TMCs, payment
solutions and technology. Based in Zurich, his previous roles include global
category manager – travel at pharmaceutical company Takeda. “I'm half Irish,
half Swiss, born in London, and ended up in Switzerland 40-odd years ago,” he
says.
“The mood is very good among buyers in Switzerland right now,” says Dominic Short, president of the Association of Swiss Travel Management (ASTM). Some companies, he says, “are already back to or pretty near 2019 travel volumes” which he attributes to a number of idiosyncrasies.
“Firstly, Switzerland had a very strong programme to make sure companies wouldn’t have to make redundancies during Covid, so everybody was just on hold,” he explains. “The minute travel bans were lifted people started to travel again.”
Secondly, he says, the diminutive nature of the country, its high costs and its reputation for innovation have meant many corporates have large proportions of international travel across Europe – Germany and France are its biggest markets – but also to North America and Asia.
“Switzerland is such a small country that anybody who produces a product or a service has to export because the home market alone will never make it fly,” says Short.
“We're the most innovative country on the planet,” he says, adding that it has the most patents per capita of anywhere in the world. “Anything that comes from Switzerland normally comes with a massive price premium, so if you want to produce something here and you want to sell it around the globe it has to be something that nobody else has. That makes us a massive export nation and means we need to travel.”
Short says that, as a result, it is also a “very high yield country” for travel management companies and suppliers. “Look at the Lufthansa Group numbers and you’ll see that Swiss has always been a big contributor to their net profit.”
For the same reason, all the global TMCs have a significant presence in the country and transaction fees are “much higher than in the UK or France”. Short adds: “Switzerland is a very profitable market for them”.
Swiss buyers’ positive outlook is reflected in the rude health of the Association of Swiss Travel Management itself. Founded only four years ago, on the eve of the pandemic, it now has a 'contact base' of around 4,500 buyers, finance directors, procurement and HR personnel, including representatives from “all the household names” such as Novartis, Roche, UBS and Nestle.
The timing of its formation necessitated a “community model” rather than paid membership, something that has enabled it to grow faster than it might have done otherwise, says Short.
The association had previously existed in another guise, STM, a more informal peer group based around Lake Geneva which operated as a regional chapter of AFTM, the association of French travel management. That changed when Short and Sabah Kahoul, ASTM vice president, picked up the reins in 2019.
“Sabah has a lot of credibility in the French market and when she knocked on their door [AFTM’s] they were delighted to have someone of her quality involved. We all got together and we said if we’re going to do this we’re not doing it as a region of ASTM but as a whole country and have English as our accepted language. They were very understanding and we are happy to be a partner, not a subsidiary, of AFTM,” Short explains.
“We launched and then Covid came and we fell a bit below the radar. We took the time during Covid to grow as a community and we, unlike AFTM, and unlike all the other associations in Europe, I believe, are not on a membership model. Our buyers do not pay anything and mine and Sabah’s roles are voluntary.”
With the support of suppliers, the association hosts quarterly in-person events and an annual buyer-only gathering, plus “small bits and pieces in between” and is supported by a “top class board of buyer directors” and an industry supplier board.
Its mission is to encourage engagement, to represent the travel buyer community, and to educate corporates, which Short says have very wide levels of maturity.
“Sharing know-how is so important because we have a lot of very well developed [travel programmes] but we need to educate the next tier down which is really under-developed,” says Short. “We have an awful lot of SMEs and some of them have very little education in procurement and business travel management. We need the UBSs and the Roches to package up their know-how for the next tier down.”
He adds: “Switzerland is not the most developed market in business travel management. ITM in the UK has been around for a long time, VDR has been in place in Germany for decades. We are only in year four and everyone’s being super supportive because they see we’re doing really good work for the industry that was missing in the past.”