Travel Specialist

What is The Role

We are seeking a thorough and strategic Travel Specialist to handle our corporate travel program and optimize our global travel spend. In this role, you will bridge the gap between day-to-day travel operations and high-level vendor management. The Specialist will work closely with the Global Sourcing and Procurement teams in India and North America.

What You Will Be Doing

• Execute a global travel strategy aligned with company objectives, financial goals, and employee experience expectations.
• Act as the primary point of contact for account managers at airlines, hotel groups, and car rental agencies.
• Supervise travel patterns and spend data to find opportunities for further savings or program improvements.
• Track leakage (out-of-policy bookings) and implement strategies to drive bookings back through preferred channels.
• Identify, negotiate, and secure Corporate Negotiated Rates (CNRs) with key airline partners and hotel chains to maximize return on investment.
• Execute the end-to-end Request for Proposal (RFP) process, from data collection to final contract execution.
• Review, summarize, and analyze data and present findings in a concise and structured manner. Execute and distribute procurement spend reports according to predefined monthly or quarterly reporting schedules.
• Provide monthly reports to leadership on the performance of negotiated contracts and overall program health.
• Support sourcing strategy and procurement optimization processes by providing data insights and recommendations. Perform procurement analytics to deliver useful insights to larger procurement team to enable significant business impact
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Finance, Sourcing, P2P etc.) to gather monthly and quarterly data for analysis.
• Serve as a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for category sourcing managers and functional leads for providing category-specific spend reports
• Bring analytical and conceptual skills linking issue resolution to process improvement.
• Conduct training on analytical tools and dashboards, as needed.
• Build strong relationships with business collaborators and cross-functional partners.
• As a system administrator, update/maintain various procurement tools and system configurations. Collaborate with IT and various other departments to efficiently manage the procurement systems. Lead implementation efforts for any new tools and/or features of existing tools

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in business or finance/accounting or equivalent.
• 3–5 years of experience in corporate travel management, procurement, or a related role within the travel industry.
• Strong ability to collect and interpret data, identify and communicate potential opportunities and risks.
• Strong data analytics and report building skills through tools such as MS Excel & Google G-Suite. Advanced experience with the following procurement tools will be considered an asset: Workday Strategic Sourcing (ScoutRFP), ServiceNow, Monday.com, Netsuite, and Confluence Wiki.
• Willingness to learn new technologies in procurement data analytics.
• Project management (including change management) experience and skills.
• Strong communication, influencing, negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
• Possess high integrity combined with good judgement, with the ability to identify, recommend and select the best overall solution
• Strong ability to develop and manage relationships with key business partners and suppliers.
• Be a self-starter with a positive, can-do attitude. Must be willing to work on one’s own initiative and must be focused on achieving goals.
• Work hours - EMEA shift (1pm to 10pm IST) aligning with North America time zones overlap including flexibility in work times to support all other global time zones when needed.