Speaker Biography's

Marko is Head of Innovation at lastminute.com, leading the lastminute.com labs innovation team currently focused on developing new mobile experiences. Previously he worked on personalisation and search engine optimisation systems for lastminute.com and Travelocity sites across Europe. Prior to lastminute.com, Marko led the development team at Cellectivity and product design at flutter.com/betfair.com. His innovation experience has also included stints at Xerox EuroPARC, Ricoh Innovations and some of the early work on recommender systems during a PhD at Stanford University.

Paul Lyonette is Head of Emerging Media for Microsoft Advertising, responsible for Video, Mobile and Gaming (in-game and around game – X-Box) Advertising revenues in the UK. Video includes the new MSN Video Player, which shows full length TV shows, growing the short form content that MSN previously published. He also heads up the Creative Solutions Team at Microsoft who delivers creative executions across all of Microsoft’s products and beyond.

Paul Lyonette was previously Head of Mobile Sales UK for Microsoft Advertising, responsible for overseeing all mobile advertising revenues across MSN and Windows Live inventory along with monetising and establishing further syndicated mobile sites.

Paul joined Microsoft in October 2008 to continue the growth of the mobile ad revenues and develop new revenue streams. In his first month, the team delivered a record month of advertising revenue and underwent full synching into the Microsoft Advertising structure.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Paul was Head of Sales at Rhythm New Media, a US start-up that became the leading name in mobile video advertising and developed ad-funded video into a million pound a year sales business. Rhythm was partners with 3 out of the 5 major operators in the UK, served over 72 million videos and carried over 100 Brands Advertising campaigns.

Before making the move into mobile, Paul worked in the traditional media spaces of outdoor with SMG-owned Primesight and in radio for the largest commercial national station in the world, Classic FM.

When outside of the world of advertising, Paul enjoys watching his beloved Liverpool FC and playing football whenever he can.

Alan Josephs is the CEO of Travel Intelligence, a UK based online travel agent specializing in luxury and boutique hotels. Travel Intelligence has two consumer brands (www.travelintelligence.com and www.chicretreats.com) and a strong private label business powering the technology and booking process for a number of other luxury hotel brands including Room for Romance, Luxique and Hip Hotels. Alan was most recently the Managing Director for ebookers, one of Europe’s largest online travel companies with sites in 13 countries including the Mr. Jet brands in Sweden and Denmark. Alan took over as the Managing Director for ebookers in March 2006 to lead the technical and organizational integration into Orbitz Worldwide.

Prior to his role at ebookers, Alan was responsible for the vacation packaging, cruise and destination services business units for the Orbitz and CheapTickets online travel brands in the United States. Alan led the creation of Orbitz’s own dynamic packaging technical infrastructure, allowing Orbitz to move away from a third party technology to a directly managed dynamic packaging product line. Before joining Orbitz in 2003, Alan spent ten years working in a variety of product, marketing and general management roles at Travelocity, the Global Vacation Group and Iomega Corporation.

Claire Higgins is currently the Head of Marketing at vtravelled.com, the social media website launched in June by Virgin Atlantic. She is responsible for setting and delivering the marketing and sales strategy to deliver revenue, readership growth and user loyalty.

Immediately prior to joining Virgin Atlantic, Claire was at Glam Media where her role was to redefine the UK brand positioning, editorial, sales and marketing strategy, reaching over 12 million men and women online every month.

Claire has also held the position of Head of Marketing at Hearst digital, the digital division of the National Magazine Company (NatMag) where she was responsible for delivering the B2B and B2C marketing strategy, across the company’s portfolio of websites, including handbag.com, company.co.uk and cosmopolitan.co.uk, which collectively reach one third of all women online in the UK.

In this role, Robin analyses the trends affecting businesses online and works with Hitwise clients to identify opportunities and threats to online business growth. Robin writes regular Insight Reports on a range of industries, covering affiliate marketing, search, and audience profiling. Robin is a regular speaker at industry events in Europe, North America and Asia, and has been widely quoted in the media, including the Financial Times, the BBC, DM Review and Information Age. Prior to joining Hitwise, Robin worked at the Corporate Executive Board and as a Lead Technology Analyst with Datamonitor, where he authored research reports on a wide variety of topics including eCommerce, direct marketing and customer relationship management.

I’m responsible for developing the business direction, the range of products and services, client strategies and operational management for Vexed Digital. Following on from my BA in anthropology and politics at Manchester University, I went onto complete a Masters in Anthropology at SOAS, London University. This lead to me starting my career in the not for profit sector working in the project management and then fundraising side. The dot com boom developed my interest in all things digital and I joined Good Technology in 1999, rising from Marketing Director to Managing Director from 2003. I joined Vexed in April 2009. Outside of work my passions are my kids, retail therapy and escaping the family for a run along the river.

Chris Carmichael has worked in travel for over 19 years, with 12 years online. During this time Chris has seen ba.com grow from an "interesting project" through to the most important channel for the airline. Chris has specialised in the areas of localisation, online self-service, search, and advanced customer metrics. Over the last few years he has spearheaded the airlines use of mobile for customers, and is now using his crystal ball to work out where the web is going next.

Tom Jenkins is the Executive Director of the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA), which represents tour operators and their suppliers at European level. It promotes greater awareness of the benefits provided by the group travel industry and influences European tourism policy and legislation.

Under Tom’s stewardship, ETOA’s scope of activities have broadened considerably, close relationships have been built with numerous legislators and other trade bodies and membership has more than doubled to the point where the Association now represents the interest of over 8 million inbound tourists.

Tom is a ‘Tourism Expert’, often called upon by a variety of media including GM TV, BBC TV, CNN, CNBC and Radios 4 & 5.

He is known for his outspoken views. On safety and security, he says: “When knitting needles are taken from elderly ladies, nail clippers from young girls and airport restaurants are devoid of cutlery, then the terrorists have succeed in stripping the travel industry of its sense of style and amenity and they have won.”

On the Olympics, he says: “The data is conclusive: hosting the Olympics does not bring a sustained increase in tourism.”

On vat, he says: “If I were a UK-based lawyer drafting a contract for someone based outside the EU, my bill would not be subjected to VAT; if I were a UK-based film producer making a film for someone based outside the EU, my bill would not be subjected to VAT; however, If I am a UK-based tour operator creating a holiday fuffers from totally unjustifiable discrimination vis-à-vis foreign-based competition.”

Before taking the reins at ETOA, Tom held a number of management positions at American, Express, ultimately being responsible for all aspects of the company’s inbound leisure travel for scheduled tours, independent vacations and customised itineraries. There, he launched a fully integrated computerised booking system, he developed the first interactive CD-Rom brochure and he managed a corps of 350 tour managers operating throughout Europe.

Prior to joining American Express, Tom was a Director of Equinox Travel and before that he spent 5 years as a tour manager working for American Express and Thomas Cook.

Tom graduated from Bristol University with a BA in English & History. Following this he embarked on two years post-graduate research at London University’s Courtauld Institute. He is married with two children.

Rob has over 20 years experience of working within the travel industry, the last ten of which were focused on the online channel. He began his career in travel at Trailfinders selling round the world trips and adventure travel before moving on to become General Manager of London Student Travel – then the largest single site travel agency in the world with 120 staff in 1990.

Direct marketing, operations and general management roles followed before he became hooked by the then emerging internet and its opportunities for selling travel to students as eCommerce Director at Student specialist Campus Travel in 2000.

In 2004 he set-up Vivid Lime, a full service digital marketing agency for the Collinson Group before moving to TUI Travel PLC as eCommerce Director of the Activity Sector in early 2006.

Since then the Activity Sector has grown to include more than 50 businesses globally in five divisions – Marine, Adventure, Student, Sports and Ski.

TUI Travel PLC is a leading international leisure travel group which operates in approximately 180 countries worldwide and serves more than 30 million customers in over 25 source markets.

A journalist for 16 years, Kevin started his career as a sub-editor for the Police Gazette newspaper at New Scotland Yard in London. He left in 1997 to read criminology at university and then joined the Essex Enquirer as a reporter before becoming a core member of the editorial team at leading business title Media Week (UK). After running mediaweek.co.uk for almost two years, Kevin became the first full time editor of Travolution in 2005, playing a fundamental role in creating one of the fastest growing B2B media brands in the UK in recent years including the launch of a website, awards programme and annual conference in under three years. Travolution was shortlisted for Magazine of the Year at the 2007 PPA Awards and Research Project of the Year at the 2008 AOP Awards. Kevin is a regular speaker, panellist and moderator at industry events and joined Tnooz as co-founder and editor in August 2009.

George Morgan-Grenville joined Abercrombie & Kent in 1986 after a short service commission in the Coldstream Guards where he served in London, The Falkland Islands, Australia & Hong Kong. Over the last twenty years he has travelled the world including becoming the first westerner to travel by private saloon rail carriage across Central Asia. During this period he also organised several private trips for the Prince of Wales to Tanzania, Nepal & Turkey. He was then appointed Managing Director of A&K in southeast Asia, before taking over as Managing Director of A&K in London in 2000, and then as President of A&K in North America in 2002. He has made numerous appearances on television both in the UK and USA including CNBC, Sky, Channel 4 and ABC. He has also served on several key industry Advisory Boards/panels including Forbes 400, Who’s Who in America, Luxury Travel Expo and Stratus Rewards. He is currently Group Chief Marketing Officer for Abercrombie & Kent and Chairman of the UK, USA & Australian offices.

Tom Parker is the Secretary General of the European Technology & Travel Services Association (ETTSA), which was launched in 2009 to represent and promote the interests of global distribution systems (GDS) and online travel distributors at the EU level. Tom is a key figure in the Brussels public relations and public affairs community. In a career spanning two decades, he has cultivated unmatched expertise in working within the EU political, regulatory, and wider Brussels stakeholder environments, including EU media. He is an expert in preparing and executing political crisis communication strategies. He played a pivotal role in bringing his previous consultancy to a position of European public affairs eminence. Tom is currently the Managing Partner of Cambre Associates, an innovative Brussels-based integrated public affairs and public relations firm.

Tim took up his new role in the UK in August 2009. He is responsible for defining and implementing the Amadeus Group’s financial, commercial, sales, product and technical strategies in the UK and Ireland. Prior to this, Tim was Managing Director for Amadeus Australia and New Zealand, based in Sydney. And before that he was the Director of Market Management for Amadeus Asia Pacific based in Bangkok. Fluent in Spanish, Tim has lived in the US, Spain, Thailand, Singapore and Australia.

Sarah Smalley is Managing Director of GfK Ascent-MI, having founded the company in 2007.

Working in partnership with the travel industry, Sarah was responsible for hand-picking and leading the team that created the Leisure Travel Monitor (LTM), a unique market intelligence service for the total outbound holiday market.

In April 2009 Ascent MI was acquired by German market research firm GfK Retail and Technology, part of the GfK Group - the fourth largest market research company in the world.

Sarah has held management positions with various market research companies and is a leading authority on market performance within the UK tourism industry. Her expertise and opinions are regularly sought by both the national and international press, including Reuters and the BBC. GfK Ascent MI’s data and analysis is also frequently featured in industry publications such as TTG and Travel Weekly.

Trevor joined Lloyds bank from the UK civil service (where he worked as an economist on industrial and policy issues) after being offered a position whilst studying for a Phd. Trevor has a BA honours degree and a masters in Economics. At Lloyds, Trevor has headed up country risk analysis and worked on and presented Board papers and strategy economics to the Lloyds TSB executive. He is now Chief Economist at Lloyds Banking Group Corporate Markets. The Corporate Markets economics team supports the bank’s trading and sales activities.

He writes for various Lloyds TSB publications and articles for other publications including Moneyfacts, City AM, the Express newspaper, Real Finance and trade journals. He regularly appears on radio and TV to represent the economic views of Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets, and to be interviewed on current economic issues.

Trevor Williams is a member of the Institute of Economic Affairs Shadow Monetary Policy Committee. The Shadow MPC is an elite group of independent leading monetary economists and from June 2007, Trevor was voted in to become one of the nine voting members, and one of only four City-based members, with the remaining being professors and academics. Trevor is also on the executive committee of the Financial Statistics User Group (FSUG).

Axel Mueller is Commercial Director at Traveltainment - The Amadeus Leisure Group. Traveltainment provides a multi-market, multi-channel distribution system for effective sale of leisure travel products. Axel is responsible for Traveltainment's business operations in Eastern Europe with regional teams in Warsaw and Moscow serving customers in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Russia and 10 other Central Eastern European markets. Before joining Traveltainment in 2006 Axel held several managerial positions in Amadeus, Lufthansa and Siemens. Axel holds a university degree in International Management and is based in Sophia Antipolis (France).