General Sessions

Keynote Presentations Sponsor Industry Perspectives

Gain expertise and insight on macro-level issues in corporate travel and how they affect your day-to-day operations. Keynote and Sponsor Industry Perspective presentations given by well-known, respected leaders in travel and business will challenge your thinking and provide you with innovative intelligence.

Keynote Presentation:
Global Economic Outlook

Dr. Nariman Behravesh
Chief Economist
Global Insight

Behravesh is Executive Vice President and Chief Economist, directing Global Insight's entire forecasting process. He is responsible for developing the economic outlook and risk analysis for the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and other emerging markets. He and his team of over 325 professionals were ranked by the Wall Street Journal in its annual ratings of top U.S. forecasters for 2006 as #3 (out of 56), and the only forecaster to place in the top six for 2003, 2004 and 2006. Dr. Behravesh and his team were also ranked #1 in USA Today's 2004 list of top economic forecasters. Dr. Behravesh is a graduate of MIT and holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under Nobel prize-winning economist Lawrence Klein. He has been covering the global economy for over 30 years and has lived in Europe and the Middle East. He is fluent in several languages, including French and Italian. Read Full Biography

A Common Thread: Weaving New Immigrant Populations into Europe’s Social Fabric

Sylvia Poggioli
Senior European Correspondent
National Public Radio

According to Sylvia Poggioli, Senior European Correspondent for National Public Radio, Europe’s social systems are being strained as a result of an unprecedented influx of immigrant populations from North Africa who cross the borders of France, Germany, Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia and Spain. The biggest challenge for these European governments is how to support these groups which are not easily integrated into the fabric of European society.

In her keynote address for the ACTE Global Education Conference in Rome, Poggioli will discuss how, in a climate of mounting fear and mistrust, language taboos are being broken, politically correct discourse is being challenged, and even European leftists are beginning to debate the limits of tolerance

Since joining NPR's foreign desk in 1982, Poggioli's on-air analysis has encompassed the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and noteworthy coverage from Prague. In early 1991, she supplemented NPR's Gulf War coverage, reporting from London on European reactions to events surrounding the war.

In 2004, Poggioli was the inaugural recipient of the WBUR Foreign Correspondent Award, presented to an outstanding public radio foreign correspondent and, in 2002, she received the Welles Hangen Award for Distinquished Journalism from Brown University.

The daughter of Italian anti-fascists who were forced to flee Italy under Mussolini, Poggioli graduated from Harvard College in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in romance languages and literature. She later studied in Italy under a Fulbright Scholarship. Read Full Biography

The War in Iraq: Its Impact on the Global Arena

John F. Burns
London Bureau Chief, The New York Times

John F. Burns is the longest-serving foreign correspondent in The New York Times' history, having worked for more than 30 years on assignment in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. For many of those years, he has been the paper's representative in countries and regions that have been the focus of the world's attention — South Africa during the last phases of apartheid; China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970's and its subsequent opening to the world under the "open door" policy; the Soviet Union during one of the harshest periods of the Cold War; the former Yugoslavia during the wars in the early 1990's in Croatia and Bosnia; Afghanistan during the period of the Soviet military withdrawal, the rise of the Taliban, and the American-led military campaign that ended Taliban rule there; and Iraq, during the height of Saddam Hussein's repression, the war that overthrew him, and its aftermath.Read Full Biography