Interview: Celine Diriberry, Travel Manager of the Year 2024

Stakeholder management is sometimes considered a ‘necessary evil’ in managed travel, but, when executed effectively, it can drive cost savings and promote meaningful change. That is how British American Tobacco’s (BAT) global sourcing manager for travel, Celine Diriberry, consolidated the company’s global travel programme across 89 markets.

With a background in procurement, Diriberry joined BAT in 2016 tasked with defining a hotel and airline sourcing strategy for the company. Last year, however, she turned her attention to the company’s fragmented booking model and launched a lengthy tender process to appoint a global travel management company after 12 years with an incumbent that, while not global, managed 80 per cent of the company’s travel spend.

Celine Diriberry is global sourcing manager for travel at British American Tobacco. She was named Travel Manager of the Year at the Business Travel Awards Europe for her achievements in successfully consolidating a vast and disparate travel programme with very limited resources.

For Diriberry, a global RFP (request for proposal) represented an opportunity to elevate the BAT travel programme with new technology that would streamline processes for booking and payment, drive policy compliance and align the travel vertical to the company’s wider ESG goals.

Without an executive mandate, nor a travel team to support her, Diriberry alone was tasked with convincing BAT’s 18,000+ global travellers to adopt new booking practices and make the transition to a new TMC.

“I love a challenge, and I love to learn,” Diriberry told BTN Europe after being shortlisted as a finalist for the Travel Manager of the Year award. “I’m still learning and what’s nice, after eight years, is seeing how we’ve managed to transform end-market engagement because that’s so crucial when you don't have an official sponsor or business owner.”

The run up to the global RFP was therefore strategically long and required a heavy dose of internal campaigning. Diriberry had to first seek approval from the BAT board and then worked to secure buy-in from travellers and travel bookers across 89 markets.

This included engaging stakeholders within larger markets, such as Australia and the US, where BAT previously worked with local TMCs, as well as with smaller markets that were not previously involved in BAT’s managed travel programme and where the global team had limited visibility over spend.

To help steer the company towards consolidation, Diriberry wrangled cross-functional support from leaders across finance, legal, security, HR and IT, communicating the wider benefits of a global travel programme. She also enlisted the help of France-based consulting firm Areka to launch and manage the tender process.

BAT has strict codes around corporate governance, which required Diriberry to engage internal stakeholders “one by one”, said Aurelie Duprez, founding partner at Areka. “Celine was always focused on traveller benefits – what changing the TMC would bring to the traveller, and what a new online booking tool would bring in terms of experience and efficiency,” Duprez added. “That was always the key message… and the end markets could feel that.”

Each market in which BAT operates has a local travel policy derived from the company’s global travel and expense framework. Diriberry utilised the RFP process to create greater consistency for travel bookers and, where possible, broaden the scope of the company’s corporate card programme to make payment and expense processes easier and more widely available for travellers.

“Payment is not a benefit. It’s a tool,” she said. “If we’re asking our employees to incur expenses on behalf of the business, we need to give them the tools to be able to pay for it.”

She also helped to reshape the global framework to include a stronger focus on sanctions and duty of care as well as introducing language that specifically addresses how travel contributes to the company’s CO2 footprint – with guidance to reduce carbon emissions linked to travel, such as avoiding same-day trips and adopting a virtual-first approach to meetings. “We've reworded the policy to address the end-user and make it more relatable,” Diriberry said.

Sustainable sourcing

Carbon emissions related to business travel represent less than 1 per cent of BAT’s overall emissions. Nevertheless, the company has a goal reduce its travel footprint by 50 per cent by 2030 (against a 2020 baseline). And Diriberry is determined to raise awareness of the company's efforts.

In 2023, she completed the Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s four-week-long Sustainable Business Travel Course and, following an assessment of BAT’s travel programme, presented her findings to executive leaders. This, in turn, helped to inform the TMC tender process as well as affect wider travel policy changes.

“Celine was one of our first clients to include sustainability criteria in the airline sourcing process [in 2023], with very closed questions,” Duprez said. “She then shared very transparently how they each scored against their competitors and this feedback was very well received.”

Diriberry applied these learnings to the TMC tender, which, among other things, included “very clear questions” around sustainability. Based on responses, a score was attributed to each TMC and contributed to the overall evaluation criteria. Ultimately, FCM was awarded the BAT contract.

“Throughout the tender we could feel that FCM was the right cultural fit for us,” Diriberry said. “They were looking for a partnership and that’s what we were looking for… and their sustainability reporting and technology also filled the gaps I had with the incumbent TMC,” she explained.

The partnership includes a company-wide rollout of FCM Extension, which integrates sustainability-focused nudges across the six online booking tools that BAT uses globally, as well as pop-up messages on internet browsers to drive policy compliance and prevent leakage.

For example, if an employee opens marriott.com on their interest browser, a pop-up message appears outlining the duty of care principles of the BAT travel framework and directs them instead to its approved booking channels. “It’s not only about sustainability, it’s also about the safety and security of travellers,” said Diriberry.

Meanwhile, the OBT nudges will help to influence more sustainable travel choices by communicating CO2 emissions in relatable terms. And in markets where rail travel makes up a “significant” number of trips, such as in France or Belgium, local travel policies already recommend rail over air on viable routes, Diriberry said.

Setting clear objectives  

Similar to her hotel and airline sourcing strategies, Diriberry’s new TMC contract includes regular KPI reviews with a focus on driving travel policy compliance and OBT adoption. There’s also “a very detailed service level agreement”.

Beyond the “usual” performance indicators, like response times to phone calls or email requests, Diriberry said her new SLA also covers invoicing and reporting accuracy, cost saving optimisation and the introduction of new technology to help optimise the travel programme.

“The SLA covers a lot of topics, 35 per cent of which is focused on end-user satisfaction,” she explained. “This includes a commitment to deliver the SLA at end-market level. So, regardless of whether the global SLA is achieved, if targets aren’t met in local markets, penalties will be incurred in those markets.”

Commenting on the RFP process, Durpez added: “Celine made it to the finish line by combining passion and commitment. She’s also very respectful of suppliers. She’s always extremely respectful of our time and ensures that we’re on the same page – and I’ve seen her operate in the same way with TMCs and airlines; working in a transparent way.”

Effective implementation 

Global implementation began in July and is ongoing, with the last of BAT’s 89 markets set to onboard with FCM in November, when Diriberry will also have a team of six outsourced regional travel managers.

Throughout this time, Diriberry has created and distributed educational materials for travellers and conducted OBT training sessions in each market. She’s also worked with local teams to create promotional campaigns in the lead up to the go-live date across various geographies.

At the culmination of the six-month-long implementation, 48 of BAT’s 89 markets will have an online booking tool, 10 of which are new to the global travel programme while 11 had not previously used an online booking tool.

“The hardest part is change management,” Diriberry said. “In some countries, I’ve given them the shock of their lives.”

In less mature markets across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, where content from local vendors is still not accessible via GDS channels, Diriberry said BAT’s travel booking will – for the time being, at least – remain offline. “There's no point deploying an online booking tool until the market matures,” she said.

Meanwhile, to provide consistency for travel bookers, BAT has implemented Concur “as the master” to create traveller profiles in 83 markets.

“There’s a lot of moving pieces [across the markets], but they all come together for my implementation… [and] I will finally have a team to drive the travel programme, ” Diriberry said.

Looking ahead, Diriberry has her eye set on refining CO2 data and performing a “deep dive” on key city pairs to formulate further emissions reduction strategies. “This has also been part of the implementation, but until I’ve got everybody under one roof, I can’t connect all the dots.”

She also has plans to create a global quarterly travel newsletter and is working with her new team of regional travel managers to ensure they can provide the necessary operational support and drive policy compliance “because my day job is procurement, I’m not a travel manager,” she said.