Leadership and Team

Carlos Almendros is the Senior Global Travel, Card & Meetings Manager for Cisco Systems, Inc. (DJIA: CSCO), the global leader in the design and manufacture of consumer electronics, networking and communications technology and services. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cisco has more than 84,000 employees and annual revenue of US$57 billion as of 2023.

A veteran in Business Travel and often humble in his goal to achieve his team’s mission is to provide a world-class travel program ensuring safety, visibility with market insights and delivering best in class experience through People, Partnerships, Innovation and ESG Mindset.

Carlos has been instrumental aligning Travel, Card and Expense initiatives for the company with a diverse team of 8 virtually located across 4 countries and a Programme that spans over 93 countries. Carlos prides himself on his team and ensures their wellbeing and development comes first. His Technology mindset is well known amongst his industry peers, and he continues to push the boundary in this area.

During the last 18 months, his team and he have focused their attention on creating a purposeful travel program that enables employees to travel for the right reasons. Carlos was tasked to keep budgets below 40% of pre pandemic levels which he has achieved through great innovation and rigour. Carlos introduced a new approval process for travellers to safely travel again and meet his key stakeholder finance goals. By extending current partner agreements with hotels, airlines and car rental companies and introducing new innovative suppliers to support the programme, Carlos does not stop looking at ways to take the program up the next level so has been instrumental working on several task forces to better understand the distribution disruption being faced by the industry. Carlos has more recently completed a Global RFP to look at the landscape of TMC’s and Technology providers.

This has meant no ‘stop start’ of travel and delivered a consistent message to travellers, alongside Cisco Hybrid work policy. At the same time, Carlos has recruited new regional travel managers across 3 regions to align the travel team objectives, share best practices and successes and created a strong team of industry experts to represent our travel brand internally and externally in the wider industry.

Carlos continues to embrace Cisco hybrid work, foster investments in green innovation, and internalize the cost of carbon emissions to the category. Almendros was also instrumental in getting Cisco 1^st investment into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in 2023.

Carlos continues to support the wider travel industry and regularly attends global advisory and innovation meetings. He challenges industry expert with a curious mind to ask the questions that his peers want to. As we strive to move forward with our travel and to continue us to achieve a market leading programme, we are inspired to be led by Carlos.

Almendros is busy now transforming Cisco Travel category and has spent the last 12 months on a Global TMC RFP first of its kind for several years. Including 5 of the top TMC’s including digital agencies Almendros has presented a strong business case to his leadership. Almendros continues to develop sourcing strategies and implementing RFX for global projects including corporate lodging, and air transportation.  Projects included policy and technology review, implementation of best practices in demand management and application of industry metrics to quantify delivered savings.

One of Almendros accomplishment was leading Cisco through. In an environment where different technologies were being used by 80K employees for booking business travel and expense it created multiple inefficiencies, poor controls, and unhappy employee experience. In 2019 Almendros lead multiple teams to help deploy SAP Concur in over 65 counties. Over 800K Expense submissions and 500K Reservations the implementation took 9 months to complete decommissioning two systems and enabling a E2E solution diving greater compliance, improved experience.

Almendros has recently be asked to take on Cisco internal Meetings and Events which is supporting procurement activities for over 1600 events, approximately $51M of spend.

Carlos also recently managed the Cisco Global Procurement Operations, overseeing the supplier management of Accenture and evaluating Ariba Smart sourcing, contacting and catalogue solution. Prior to this role, Almendros worked as a European Service Delivery manager for a large corporate travel company. He lives in the UK with his wife and two young daughters.