Kim Hamer Delivers NDC-Powered Unique Airline Content for Visa

“It had to be someone like Kim,” said United Airlines managing director of digital sales Anthony Toth, who authored one of the three nominations BTN received for Visa senior director of global travel and events sourcing Kim Hamer to be considered for BTN’s 2022 Travel Manager of the Year Award.

The achievements that led to Hamer winning that award are easy to describe: She is the first travel manager to implement a New Distribution Capability channel for her program at scale that brings corporate-negotiated airline retailing options into a consumable managed travel product through her agency.

Explaining what that really means—and the industry’s hard-fought path to get there—takes something of a history lesson.

Hamer has seen that history in motion—some might call it slow motion. When the International Air Transport Association introduced the concept of New Distribution Capability in 2012, she was the global travel manager for luxury retail brand Coach. That was five jobs ago for the travel management veteran. Hamer cut her travel teeth at BCD Travel in a global account management role, then moved up the ranks through buyer-side positions at Accenture, Baxter, Huron Consulting and other companies before moving back to the seller side in 2018 to head up strategy and customer success at WhereTo, a next-generation booking tool startup acquired in 2020 by FCM.

Throughout Hamer’s career journey, IATA’s NDC concept has been in various stages of reality. It always held the promise of delivering a more personalized flight experience than could be achieved through a straight-up global-distribution-system connection.

Within GDS systems, airline content has been a hard-to-differentiate commodity. While there has been development with branded fares, airlines long have been frustrated with the inability to sell fare attributes like bag-check services, seat selection, priority boarding, in-flight Wi-Fi access and meals through the agency channel. Buyers and travelers have been frustrated with the inability to access this content in online booking tools or through the agency; plus, it has been a pain to track and reconcile spend for the ancillary products and services that airlines in 2008 started to unbundle from ticket prices. Getting the data or even acknowledgment of that ancillary spend toward contracted goals? Plenty of travel managers and airlines innovated to create workarounds, but it hasn’t always been pretty.

Still, NDC was a hard sell. There were a lot of questions swirling around the new standard at that time. What would NDC mean for the managed travel ecosystem? What would it mean for costs (and who would bear them)? What would it mean for the travel buyer? Were there any real reasons for the managed travel buyer to support this change? Or, absent new customized access to ancillary content, which was not immediately available even as NDC started to catch on with airlines, was the industry just investing in complexity so carriers could save some GDS dollars? Would buyers pick up savings in the margins if they accepted NDC channels? If that was it, the whole endeavor seemed an awfully heavy lift.

On top of that, not a single corporate OBT at the time could display or transact the products or services that would make airline-retailing dreams a reality for managed business travelers.

Make Me a Believer

But times change and technologies change, even in the managed travel space. Airlines pursued NDC content strategies, GDSs and booking technologies pursued broader content aggregation and display strategies. Through industry education efforts, some buyers opened their minds to the possibilities of negotiating airline contracts at the ticket-attribute level—and what that could mean to their travelers. Hamer took a leadership role in the NDC education process. As recent chair of the Global Business Travel Association’s aviation committee, she explored the concept in depth with airlines and as part of that role ran a number of panel sessions on NDC to raise awareness around its potential.

To say that the number of buyers ready to pursue NDC strategies was a minority, however, would be a vast understatement. The few who have are among the industry’s most progressive, most influential in terms of program size and the most demanding of their suppliers. Hamer is among that elite group but chose to stay under the radar with her program, rarely speaking about her project in public forums. Hamer’s strategy required vision, methodology and patience for a long game. It also required leadership to collaborate across multiple industry players—ultimately, Serko, CWT, United Airlines and Travelfusion—with an uncompromising fortitude to see the project through.  

But it was never about technology for the sake of technology. Hamer’s NDC journey with the Visa travel program started with the business traveler.

“The voice we heard from employees is that we needed something that was going to be user friendly,” said Hamer. “Something that would enable us to be a bit more self-service but provide travelers with the right choices at the right budget—and enable them to make the right decisions for that budget. So that kind of sent me down a certain path.”

That path was twofold for Hamer. First, it led to content and the ability to pull in preferred supplier content from wherever it lived, but with the goal of keeping employees within the preferred agency and online booking workflow. Second, it led to user experience. Was the content easy to access, clearly presented and intuitive to book? Was it relevant to the individual user? Would it inspire trust in the program?

What it absolutely should not do was leave travelers to book a base ticket with the agency and be forced to toggle over to the airline website to ensure they get their seat selection, pre-paid Wi-Fi or entitlements that come with their status. 

“From that standpoint, we had to determine if we had the right toolkit, and we were hearing from travelers that we had some opportunities to make some improvements,” said Hamer. “We heard from travelers that they needed something human-centric, something that would offer an experience they would do on their own, if they were purchasing travel personally.”

To Hamer, that eventually would include predicating airline search on the individual’s status and offering ancillary products in the core booking workflow. It also would include ensuring every booking was supported by Visa’s agency of record, which Hamer was also open to changing if her current provider had hesitations about pursuing her vision for a personalized, digitized program.

Pushing the Boundaries with Collaboration

“One thing that was really unique about how Kim structured the [request for proposal] was how she involved the users right from the beginning. She required us to give users in each region access to Zeno,” said Tony D’Astolfo, SVP North America for Serko, whose online booking tool Hamer chose as Visa’s global partner. “She wasn’t going to trust us that we told her it works. She wanted her users to tell her it works. I give her a lot of credit for that approach, and it got us over the line in the RFP.”

CWT EVP and chief customer officer Nick Vournakis referred to Zeno as a “challenger booking tool”—one that has been willing to take on industry giants like Concur and GetThere that tend to dominate in the large, global enterprise space, but just needed that big opportunity.

Hamer knew she needed a collaborator with speed to market. A striver like Serko might be more inclined to mold the tool and make the technology adjustments that would step up to her vision. Plus, the team had shown the foundational tool was ready for innovation. That said, she expected the same of her travel management company, and went out to bid to ensure Visa had a team on that side willing to go all in with Serko’s Zeno tool. Not every TMC is willing to incorporate another booking tool, especially if it has its own challenger-level tool the company needs to push above a player like Zeno.

Visa’s incumbent partner CWT was ready to move.

“Kim and Visa were focused very singularly on the travel experience and how to deliver an improved experience around the world,” said Vournakis. “And while there are a lot of things we know we have the capability to do, the hardest part for CWT—or any traditional TMC for that matter—is to find a customer who’s willing to make a bet, take a few chances and lead from [out] front to do some trailblazing. To work with a partner like that is a great opportunity … and the end result has got to be better than all the staid solutions from the past.”

United Airlines joined the team as Visa’s preferred supplier, and aggregator Travelfusion brought the NDC distribution pipes to the table.

Making It Real

As the group came together, it was clear that enabling unique value through NDC and servicing those tickets holistically wasn’t going to be easy. Dusty distribution frameworks, dated transaction standards, TMC platforms predicated on the die-hard Passenger Name Record—all these and more had frustrated industry players intent on delivering the promise of NDC.

“We’ve seen a lot of interesting progress on the margins as it relates to NDC … to solve for a single market or for some kind of outlier,” said Vournakis. “Kim and Visa are the first ones to bring the potential of NDC into the core of the program and to deliver unique value to the corporation.”

But there are pros and cons to turning on new technology solutions, because you can't take the new technology and just switch them on in the old environment. Rebuilding and rewiring that environment took a lot of change management and a lot of testing, with each player relying on the others to deliver the changes that would make the program work.

“We wanted to give people multiple choices and build that into policy,” Hamer said. “We also were looking ahead to what would be available to us through our NDC content negotiations to understand how we would pull that in and how we could display those negotiated bundles so travelers could choose the best value relevant to them.”

Travelfusion adjusted content pipes to ensure the choices appeared intuitively with multiple classes of service all on one screen in Zeno’s Next Generation Storefront.

“It was a lot of work from the customer to say, ‘this is confusing, but that’s not,’ or ‘now this makes sense, but I need to see it with the Visa branded fares,’ that are piped in through Travelfusion,” said D’Astolfo. “If you think these are simple conversations, they aren’t. It’s hard to adequately display all this information in a way that’s not confusing to the user. All of that had to be really collaborative with United and Travelfusion.” 

As one partner would make a change, it would affect functions up and down the stream.

“We have multiple systems coming together and that’s been the inherent challenge in this process. We’ve connected an API with the front end OBT and also the mid- and back office but we also have the GDS pipe for those airlines that aren’t NDC,” said Hamer.

Getting those pieces to talk together creates challenges—how do you account for it in the mid- and back office, how do you train agents for it and who would service the bookings? With NDC, the airline technically could service the booking, but that wasn’t the experience Visa wanted for the traveler, plus the company wanted that data and control to stay with the agency of record. Those roles and responsibilities had to be clearly delineated.

“We needed to make sure we got clarity on how that PNR and the reservation flows through the system, that we don't lose control and, quite frankly, that we continue to put the onus on the TMC in terms of being there and being able to service the booking amidst any potential disruption,” said Vournakis.

“The OBT had to make some critical path changes. The agency had to change mid- and back-office functions. At United, we had to build some redundancy for redundancies,” said Toth, referencing a series of data feeds, specifically for risk management, that were critical for ensuring duty of care. Unused ticket processes also needed to join up with the agency.

D’Astolfo characterized some of these calls as “grindingly laborious,” noting it would have been easy for Hamer to let go of some details and fall back on traditional processes.

“It’s been a long process, but I think it's uncovered a bunch of learnings, and Kim has been willing to lead the way,” D’Astolfo said. “We still have some issues because the content is not coming from a traditional source, so we all had to sit there and work through how the TMC will see it and service it. It’s not perfect right now, but we want to make sure we get it right.”

“She’s pushed everyone really hard,” he added. Vournakis and Toth both used the word “uncompromising” to describe Hamer’s approach.

Every collaborator also said Hamer has been willing to dig in and do whatever is necessary on the Visa side to drive the vision.

“Kim has maintained a strong sense of urgency in how we move this forward,” said Vournakis. “But she's also been willing to work with us in terms of saying, ‘Hey, I recognize this is new. I recognize that this requires development.’ ”

Toth echoed that statement. “As a partner she understands—do we have the right resources lined up? Is there work we didn't understand? Do we have that work properly prioritized? Where else can Visa help?”

Connecting All the Dots … Not Just NDC

Today, Hamer is negotiating unique corporate bundles for Visa travelers based on their United loyalty status. “I don’t need to negotiate an Economy Plus seat for a 1K Mileage Plus member because that comes with their status,” said Hamer. “But I do want to negotiate that for my travelers who are Premier members, say, who are flying San Francisco to New York. I want that choice presented to them and to be clearly in policy for them in the booking tool so they know Visa is adding value to their experience.”

The fares returned for air search on United will differ from traveler to traveler. While that now happens by design, Hamer has gotten in front of the confusion it might cause—particularly for travel bookers, who are most likely to notice and remark on what could appear to be pricing or content “discrepancies” among different travelers.

“She set up these training session because she wanted travel bookers to be super educated on the Mileage Plus element, because there’s going to be different content returned depending on that [status],” said Toth. “Travelers also need to know that the online booking tool will look different and that they can self-serve some new things in that environment, so she’s put a lot of effort into that change-management piece internally as well.”

Only United content is tailored for Visa through Travelfusion pipes right now. Hamer is using the carrier’s new customized contracting model and was one of the beta customers for that rollout. But Hamer doesn’t plan to stop with a single carrier for her NDC program model.

“United is a preferred partner for us for a number of reasons, and it made a lot of sense for us to start there,” Hamer said. “The airlines are in various stages with NDC themselves, so we have to go where capabilities are … but we have several strategic partners on our list after United that we will definitely pursue.”

Hamer’s vision for a user-centered program has not just impacted where and how the Visa travel program sources and presents content. It has changed how she is able to promote travel policies as a choice for Visa travelers, how Visa travelers now pay and report on their travel expenses, and how she has configured CWT’s service delivery and commercial agreement with Visa. It also includes some automation elements like self-service ticket exchanges within the OBT that have been “hugely important,” according to Hamer and Vournakis to alleviate certain calls to the agency.

Still, agency service is central to delivering Visa’s program, and has been expanded in Visa’s new configuration. “We now have 24/7 service delivery,” Hamer said, eliminating any service or pricing differentials between on-hours and off-hours support, globally. She also hammered out a subscription model fee with CWT, eliminating the need for travelers to understand or file TMC fee-related expense reports back to the organization. “That’s really confusing for travelers and doesn’t fit with our simplification goals,” she said.

With subscription pricing, all TMC fees are funneled away from individual travelers for central payment. Vournakis said the structure eliminates the “grunt work” of reconciliation for Visa and puts the onus back on the TMC, “which is squarely where it belongs,” he said, to simplify invoicing and do it in one country with one currency. “We want to remove what could be white noise within a global program.”

Asked about transparency for what the client pays for within a subscription fee, Vournakis said, “We can't get into that kind of a relationship if we don't provide maximum clarity back to the corporate on what our costs are in the system, how we get to pricing … and our expected margins on the deal.” He also noted that, with a transparent relationship, the subscription fee could evolve over time based on multiple variables like volume or complexity.

Managing Transformation

“We knew we had a lot of room for change; our travel program was OK, but we didn’t really know what great looked like,” said Visa VP of global strategic sourcing Mithun Sharma, who was part of the leadership team that hired Hamer in 2020 to lead that makeover. “We started looking at all the new technology that was popping up, the different types of APIs and linkages possible between third-party systems, and we realized we had an opportunity to really change that employee experience around travel. It needed to be faster; it needed to be easier and employees could be more productive. That's what we brought Kim in to do—to define what ‘great’ looks like.”

“Kim started with internal alignment way at the top in the company with the agreement that we're going to change, that the way we've been managing travel at Visa for [so many years] is going to be different,” Toth said. Then, she got everyone in the food chain, including travelers, aligned toward that goal. “It had to be someone like Kim,” he added. “She brought breadth and depth of experience specific to every constituent that needed to come to the table to make this happen. She understood the difficulties of the TMC, she understood the technology environment, and she’s worked with these challenges in the supplier space. In the end—and I didn’t realize this at first—but in the end, I realized that what she brought to everyone in this project was a clear vision and the ability to manage change. That was the difference.”

Managing transformation during the Covid-19 pandemic had both pros and cons—with periods “where it took us longer to get from point A to point B,” said Hamer. “But it also helped because it gave us time to review all the tools and processes, and even with Covid, there were technology advancements during that quiet period in the industry, and we were able to take advantage of it.”

Emerging from the pandemic with a new travel program and platform in 2022 has been a bonus, said Hamer, with employees open to change, especially since Hamer and her team have been diligent in bringing users into the process.  

“It’s all been about that listening. Listening to your people listening to your employees, hearing what they want,” said Hamer. And while the result isn’t perfection—the project has run into some gaps with split ticketing, for example, that the team continues to work through—the deliverables so far have been meaningful. “It’s all about individual steps toward delivering the right experience.”

Hamer is forthcoming about the fact that she was flying under the radar with Visa’s travel program transformation. “I’m not a person who really likes to draw a lot of attention,” she said. But she hopes the work she has done can be an example for the industry.

“If you think about how the industry is behaving today and the challenges that we're faced with from a staffing perspective, we need to find ways to better automate systems and technology,” she said. “We want to create more avenues to relevant content and personalization. NDC is one of those avenues, so I hope what we’ve achieved here can drive the industry forward in a positive way.”