A Week with Corporate Travel Executives & HRS Leadership on the California Coast

Introuction

It’s been an invigorating few days presenting and selling in the Big Apple. As I posted earlier this week, I joined several of my HRS Group colleagues at North America’s newest corporate travel event, Business Travel News BTS Americas. The show brought together travel managers, procurement leads, agency partners, tech providers, and suppliers for two full days of inspiration, networking, and insight.

Business Travel Show America: A New Event for Corporate Travel

With 100 exhibitors, 18 sessions, and a packed agenda focused on the core challenges facing travel programs today, this event delivered in spades. Attendees engaged with panels on sustainable travel strategies, technologies to cut costs, traveler wellbeing, and innovation in the TMC space. The agenda was carefully crafted to support roles across the spectrum — travel buyers, operations leaders, and tech innovators alike.

A highlight of the event was the Innovation Faceoff, the spin off of what many in the industry still refer to as Business Travel News’ Innovate event.  Over the years, HRS Stay, Work & Pay has consistently participated in this competition, bringing forward fresh ideas and pushing ourselves to think bigger and bolder in how we serve clients.

For those of you familiar with BTN Innovate, this format was identical. Startups and innovators pitch their travel or meeting solutions to a panel of judges and a live audience, with both a Judges Award and a People’s Choice Award. The Faceoff is always fast — each pitch must be sharp, focused, and compelling in under seven minutes with four minutes for the judges and two minutes for the audience asking questions.

I represented HRS on stage this year for the Innovation Faceoff, featuring our new Copilot platform that I’ve discussed in Corporate Insights on multiple occasions since May. And let me tell you, the excitement, nerves and anticipation were all sky-high as at the 11 “competitors” stood on the largest stage that the exhibit hall had to offer. There were 1,000+ professionals in the corporate travel space watching. The stakes feel high. This is where new technologies get serious attention from travel buyers, media, and peers.

The Dark Side of the Moon: Why We Built Copilot

During my time on stage, I introduced the audience to Copilot, our newest innovation. It’s more than just a product; it’s a mindset shift.

I opened our presentation with a metaphor from the Apollo 11 mission. When Neil Armstrong and crew passed behind the moon, they lost all signals from earth for 47 minutes. For those back at mission control, it was radio silence. Flying blind.

That, unfortunately, is exactly how most companies are still managing their hotel and meeting spend today. Roughly 40 percent of bookings are in the dark, flying blind outside the line of sight of travel managers.

Systems don’t connect. Data is delayed. Charges get reconciled weeks after a stay, and program managers can’t see where the money is going, or where the people are staying until it’s too late.

In the era of AI, that’s unacceptable.

So, we built Copilot — an AI powered assistant designed specifically to bring visibility, control, and intelligence to all hotel and meeting categories: transient, groups, long stay, and unmanaged bookings.

Copilot is bringing light to corporate travel management.

How does Copilot work?

Think of Copilot as the only AI consultant in the business travel world who actually shows their work. It connects procurement data, booking platforms, payments, and reconciliation systems to give you a unified, real time view of performance. It flags issues before they spiral. And more importantly, it doesn’t just analyze, but it recommends.

• Want to cut costs? Punch in your savings target.
• Trying to improve traveler satisfaction? Set it as a goal.
• Need to reduce emissions? Tell Copilot. It will find you the right combination of hotels, policies, and behaviors to get there

And it does it all persona based, not just by region or business unit. This is real AI in action, built on an HRS designed language model trained on decades of travel, meeting, and payment data.

Demonstrating the capabilities

During our demo at BTS America, I showed Copilot live. In just a few minutes, we walked through how a travel manager could:

• View savings, efficiency, and compliance targets in real time
• Get a health score for their program based on personalized strategic goals
• Use natural language prompts to ask for help and get AI powered answers
• Identify unmanaged spend and act on leakage by region or chain
• Accept a recommendation with one click, update policy dynamically, and track the change in the system

As I wrapped up my session, I reminded the audience that you don’t need another tool. You need a partner. Someone (or something) to help lead your travel program forward. That’s what we’ve built.

As one expects in this arena, the competition at this Innovation Faceoff was intense with twelve presenters. We offer our congratulations to Nowadays (YC S23), who took home both the Judges Award and the People’s Choice Award. The judges cited their strength in the meeting space, their clean and intuitive user experience, and the way they integrate automation with clear reporting.

If you’re interested in learning more or want to see Copilot in action for your own program, let’s connect. You can also learn more about HRS Copilot on our dedicated website. And if you missed me in New York, you can connect with me anytime here on LinkedIn.

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