We're going to be at the Global Business Travel Association Convention next week in Denver, Colorado, and we are really looking forward to it.  It should be a great opportunity to learn a bit more about the business travel segment and to meet some really interesting people, as it is really the key conference in business travel.  Should be a good one.  

Things that we are particularly looking forward to:

• Improving Policy Compliance - Travel policy is never something that is going to get people that excited. However, it is very important for corporates to be able to manage employees getting expenses paid, make sure they know where their employees are, and can contain costs of travel overall (and often get corporate discounts). As a lot of our business is through the corporate channel, this is something we are very interested in learning more about. And with that in mind, if you are a corporate travel manager and are going to be at GBTA, we'd love to arrange a time to speak to better understand how you think about rail. Contact me here if you would like to hear more about rail as part of your tool.
• Travel Value Chain Panel - This one should be really interesting, being given the opportunity to hear the views of the CEOs of all the players throughout the chain of travel technology, from an Airline (Frontier) through a GDS (Travelport) to an OTA (Expedia). It will be interesting to see how differently they see the world.
• Mavericks of Business CEO Panel - Just like John McCain (!), these CEOs are mavericks. The CEO of SouthWest Airlines, doing some pretty unique things in air, one of the founders of BestBuy and the CEO of MGM Hospitality. Quite a spread of businesses and interests, but I'm curious to hear what they have to say.
• Sean Penn - And last but not least, no travel conference is complete without some closing remarks from Sean Penn. No really, he is actually doing the closing remarks. I'm going to be even more impressed if he actually somehow ties whatever he has to say back to corporate travel, but we'll see how it goes.

And that doesn't even include the various meetings, drinks and cocktail events, and even an early morning 5K that I'm thinking about doing (we'll see how it goes...). Look forward to meeting some new people there.