Podcast: Moderna’s Jennifer Steinke on unifying travel and meetings

More travel managers than ever are taking responsibility for meetings and events alongside transient travel. 

Jennifer Steinke has led this convergence at Moderna, where she built a global travel and meetings program from scratch while bringing AI-powered insights to her stakeholders. She was recently named Business Travel News’ 2026 Travel Manager of the Year for melding AI with Moderna’s policy guidelines for meetings and travel, creating a policy of one for each user.

For the 25th episode of The Travel Is a Human Emotion Podcast, Justin Schuster, SVP of Marketing at Spotnana, spoke with Steinke, Director of Travel, Meetings and Fleet at Moderna, about the benefits of managing travel and meetings together, the AI platform she is building to unite them, and her call for faster innovation across the industry.

The case for one program

Steinke joined Moderna four years ago to build its travel program from the ground up. Today she runs a consolidated global program spanning more than 20 countries, with roughly $50 million in annual spend when meetings are included, plus expense and corporate card under the same umbrella.

For Steinke, the strongest argument for consolidating responsibility for meetings, events, and transient travel starts with the person taking the trip. “The meeting attendee and the traveler are the same person,” she said. When travel and meetings live in separate worlds, attendees navigate disparate processes for booking travel, registering for meetings, and finding their hotel.

The financial case is just as compelling. Managing both categories lets Steinke leverage total spend in supplier negotiations, speaking to hotels about everything her company brings to a brand rather than transient volume alone. 

Consolidation also unlocks reporting on the true total cost of a meeting, combining meeting space, food and beverage, hotel rooms, and airfare into one financial picture. 

“When we live in two separate worlds, it’s really hard to get that [picture],” Steinke said.

Winning over stakeholders

Bringing meetings into a travel program requires internal selling. Meetings are personal, Steinke explained, and planners can view a consolidated program as a threat to their ownership of an event.

“I tell them, I am not here to take away your glory; I’m here to spend your money wiser and make your meetings better,” she said. Executive sponsorship, the right technology, and clear storytelling about savings and better experiences all help win that buy-in.

Success brings its own challenges. In the program’s first full year, Steinke’s two-person team supported more than 360 events, a volume they have since trimmed to around 180 through prioritization. Her advice to travel managers considering the move is to understand the landscape, secure the technology and resources first, and be ready to work. 

“You’ve got to have tough skin, because it’s not gonna be easy,” she said. “But don’t be scared to ask questions, because you’re never gonna know unless you ask.”

A travel brain powered by AI

That consolidated foundation set the stage for Steinke’s most ambitious project, a platform she calls TAMI, short for Travel and Meetings Intelligence. Built and powered by AI, TAMI is designed to bring everything about travel and meetings into what Steinke calls one travel brain.

The first focus is travel booking. TAMI uses Moderna’s historical data and traveler preferences to create curated, personalized offers, an approach Steinke has coined a policy of one. It weighs her top suppliers and the ancillaries her travelers value, such as seats, bags, and lounge passes, rather than defaulting to the cheapest fare in the booking tool.

“What the industry refers to as lowest logical airfare, I call it the ‘least logical fare’, because there’s nothing logical about it,” Steinke said. A curated offer may cost more up front, but across the life of the trip it delivers a better experience and saves the organization money on extras that are already included.

TAMI will also generate true trip budgets and add contextualization, showing travelers what a route like Boston to Warsaw should cost Moderna on average rather than only what the fare displays that day. On the meetings side, an estimator will tell planners what a meeting should cost before they commit, and travelers will launch meeting registration and travel booking from a single place, with every trip tracked across its entire life cycle.

Pushing past artificial barriers

Steinke is direct about the pace of change in managed travel. “We have got to stop living in this archaic world of how travel is managed,” she said. “Technology is too old, processes are too old, we are not moving at the pace that we can.”

She points to what she calls artificial barriers to innovation, aging technology and commercial models in which revenue flows are tangled across the industry. Breaking those down, she argues, would refocus the industry on innovation, service, and experience.

She also wants buyers to push harder. As AI drives down transaction costs for suppliers and travel management companies (TMCs), buyers should ask where their share of the savings is, and TMCs should evolve toward high-touch servicing and consultancy as AI absorbs transactional work. Her call to action extends to supporting startups. 

“When there’s new startups coming into the world, take a risk, try it,” she said. “Help them grow so they just don’t get gobbled up by the competition.”

A buyer’s voice in the industry

Steinke has served on the board of the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), where she also teaches fundamentals, and was the first chairperson of the Travel and Meeting Society (TAMS). She chairs the editorial advisory board at Business Travel Executive, where a think tank of buyers now shapes the magazine’s content and recently helped drive the buyer-centric agenda of its annual summit.

“What keeps me motivated is being able to give back, being able to help people,” she said. “Whether it’s driving change in the industry, driving change in their program, or whether it’s to look at things differently.”

Travel as human connection

Asked for her reflection on the connection between travel and human emotion, Steinke pointed to what travel does to perspective. People who travel the world, she believes, are among the most intelligent people in the world because of the connections they make along the way.

“The more we look at life through other people’s lenses, we are better people, and then we are better employees and we are better travelers,” Steinke said. “Nothing can truly change how you look at life until you look at it in a different way.”