Interview: Nikki Parsons, chair, ITM

Nikki Parsons is chair of the UK’s Institute of Travel Management and global director for travel at Netherlands-based Arcadis. Her career began at STA Travel before stints with travel management companies HRG and American Express Global Business Travel. Parsons then moved over to the buyer side with roles at Merrill Lynch, Standard Bank, Citi and AIG which included positions in Singapore and New York. She returned to the UK and joined Arcadis in spring 2020.

After six years as a board member of the UK’s Institute of Travel Management, Nikki Parsons stepped into the lead role as chair in 2023, juggling all that it entails alongside her day job as global travel and meetings manager at design, engineering and consultancy company Arcadis.

“The opportunity came at the right time for me,” says Parsons, who embraces the challenge of “keeping all the plates spinning”. She continues: “You give absolutely whatever time you can and that will ebb and flow as it does for any of us through our working lives. I’m here to make sure the board’s run effectively and to represent ITM publicly and the voice of buyers.”

That can mean having challenging conversations with travel suppliers. “We have an opportunity to aggregate and amplify the issues that travel managers are dealing with. With perhaps fewer account managers within the supply community... it becomes even more important that ITM gets that feedback from multiple buyers and amplifies their message.”

In 2023, content fragmentation and Ryanair’s facial recognition technology were two developments which saw ITM take action, publicly challenging the latter and forming a taskforce to “keep the conversation going” around New Distribution Capability.

“NDC is not necessarily going to have the same impact on all travel programmes – having that low fare content might not be critical for you – but it continues to be a challenge for some until all the pathways and plumbing sorts itself out,” says Parsons.

“Unless you have the scope within your programme and your team to re-engineer it yourself, which some programmes will have, you will need to look to your travel management company to help you. But there are also new entrants in the market who potentially will have alternative solutions too.”

But Parsons is pragmatic, suggesting that content fragmentation is not a new development. “We've been talking about this in Europe ever since the dawn of low-cost carriers and getting access to that content, and understanding exactly what our travellers are buying in an unbundled marketplace has been a challenge for us for a long time, so I think to a certain extent it just comes with a new name and there's other benefits that might come further down the line.”

The wider landscape in which travel managers operate is more challenging, Parsons believes, pointing to geopolitical unrest, political change, legislation and regulation, economic uncertainty, rising costs, environmental issues and the evolving potential of AI in travel management. “They’re all pressing down on us at the moment,” she says.

“There’s been such an evolution of the travel manager role since I started in it arguably not that long ago. We were a profit centre and then we had to find our way as a really well managed and robust cost centre within an organisation. And now we've got this next iteration where we are going to have to be so much more to a business and all of its strategic objectives.”

She continues: “I feel different as a travel manager post-pandemic and my company expects different things of me. I think that's why we as the ITM board have to think about our strategy and keep evolving it. Are we where we need to be? Are we offering what our members need? We just need to continue to ask ourselves that question and keep evolving. In the latter half of last year, we began working on refining ITM's strategy, defining critical initiatives to drive that evolution, and letting the membership know what we are doing.”

Parsons joined Arcadis in 2020 as the company’s first full-time travel manager and has spent her time there since “designing a new operating model”. That included, in 2023, the consolidation of ten TMCs globally to one. “For a small team ten TMCs was tricky to manage so it was a natural next step… we needed to just have a bit more standardisation. It had been challenging to do anything in a uniform way and that became abundantly clear as we went through Covid. We needed to do things consistently globally to make sure we had that common duty of care.”

Topics specific to her travel manager role that are demanding her time include the Posted Workers Directive (PWD) and Payment Services Directive (PSD), while the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) “is going to have a big impact even if you’re not registered in the EU. Some companies are going to have a really big wake-up call in 2024”.

While business travel activity’s contribution to Scope 3 emissions will vary from company to company, Parsons says there is an opportunity “to have a seat at the table, understand what it [CSRD] means for your company, and then provide the information that is going to help sustainability teams make informed decisions”.

Parsons describes the Arcadis travel programme as mid-market and multinational and, being headquartered in Amsterdam, views rail travel as a key means of reducing its environmental impact. “It’s not a mandate, but we encourage people travelling less than 700km to take the train rather than fly,” she says, noting that for travel between the UK and Netherlands, booking trips with Eurostar is an expectation.

“We have a lot of travel between certain origins and destinations within Europe so we have to make sure travellers are aware that rail is an option, especially cross-border. We would love for the technology to catch up so that the air to rail switch sell becomes even easier. We know there is also the interconnectivity challenge on the European rail piece but there’s a lot of great work going on by the European Union to try and stitch that together.”

Parsons expects the seamless movement of people across borders to be another hot topic in the year ahead as the UK accelerates the roll-out of its Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) scheme for visitors not requiring a visa while the EU works towards implementing its Entry-Exit System (due to commence in the second half of 2024) and related European Travel Information and Authorisation System (starting mid-2025), a similar concept to the UK’s ETA scheme.

“Those will be on the agenda in 2024 but since they’re similar to the US ESTA system it shouldn’t be too problematic,” says Parsons. “The challenge will be raising awareness among business travellers who for a very long time have been used to having that freedom of movement. As a Dutch company with a lot of travel to and from the UK, we need to make sure we understand exactly what is going to be implemented in both directions and to make sure that information is available at the time of booking in OBTs because they are our shop window.”