Tom is a 30 year corporate travel industry veteran and has extensive experience with GBTA.  Tom is Director Business Development at TRIPBAM and is based in Seattle, WA.  He has held key roles in corporate business travel on both the buyer and supplier sides of the industry and is a frequent speaker at GBTA Chapter events and other events related to the industry.

Tom has held roles with United Airlines, Hertz, Travel & Transport, and Worldspan during his career as well as a Travel Manager at AT&T and special projects at Facebook.  He has been involved with sales training, account development, and portfolio management in each of these roles.

John Coffman is the Chief Financial Officer of Direct Travel, a leading corporate Travel Management Company that provides solutions and innovations in business travel to its clients.  

A Certified Public Accountant, Coffman possesses over 35 years of experience, including 13 years of public accounting and 22 years of industry experience in various finance positions.  As CFO, Coffman is responsible for the overall financial management of the company, its financial reporting and transparency, mergers and acquisitions and long-term planning.  Throughout his Travel Management career, he has completed in excess of 150 acquisitions. 

Prior to this position, Coffman served as Vice President of Global Mergers and Acquisitions at Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) for five years, where he directed the completion of seven acquisitions, across four continents. 

Previous to his tenure at CWT, Coffman held key finance roles at TQ3Navigant over a period of nine years, ultimately serving as Chief Accounting Officer where he was instrumental in developing and executing the overall business strategy and growth initiatives for the company. 

Coffman also served on the Audit and Business Advisory team at Price Waterhouse for 12 years, where his excellent industry knowledge and business acumen was instrumental in managing numerous auditing and acquisition engagements.

Coffman earned his Bachelor of Science in Business through the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  He enjoys skiing, scuba diving, and golf along with traveling to different countries.

As EVP of Sales Strategy & Productivity for TripActions, Rich Liu oversees the company’s mid-market and commercial Sales teams. Prior to TripActions, Rich was the VP of Global Corporate Sales at MuleSoft, building and leading the business unit through 4X bookings growth, an IPO, and a $6.5B acquisition by Salesforce. Prior to that, he held various leadership roles at Facebook, where he led the redesign of Facebook's ad sales organization and oversaw a $400M ARR business responsible for marketing partnerships across several industries. Prior to Facebook, Rich led sales and operations teams at Fisher Investments, a leading investment management company, where he oversaw the acquisition of more than $1 billion in new assets annually. Rich started his career as an engineer and has held research positions at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Genzyme (now Sanofi). He earned his degree in biomedical engineering from Yale University. Rich lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two daughters.