Advances in technology
mean we are now in the shopping paradox: The rise of the e-commerce behemoths
have given us a taste of what almost limitless choice looks like, and consumers
have embraced it. But at the same time, consumer’s desire personalization and
authenticity: the warm glow from shopping at a local independent store when the
owner recommends something based on their knowledge of you and your
preferences.
The same trend has
happened in the world of managed travel. In recent years, corporate travel buyers
have been shown what access to travel content should look like. They want to
know their travelers are being offered the widest possible range of content and
that they are not missing out on something better—both for traveler and company
requirements—whether that means lowest cost, least carbon or best for traveler
well-being and productivity.
Breadth of content
In part, this has been
driven by an explosion in travel products.
“A study done last
year showed a massive increase in travel products since 2010. Ten years ago,
premium economy was a niche thing that you'd see across a few airlines, now
it's a standard offering across most full-service carriers,” said Joe O’Dwyer,
American Express Global Business Travel’s (Amex GBT) director of distribution.
At Amex GBT,
recognition of this has led to the creation of its marketplace, delivering
omni-channel access to more than 2 million hotel properties in 180 countries,
including Booking.com and Expedia content; more than 200,000 airline routes
with 600+ airlines, including fast-growing low-cost carriers; and content from
60+ rail providers.
Despite this breadth,
the travel content landscape is still widening.
“For example, there
are 75 or so airlines that have live NDC programs. In the next few years virtually
all full-service carriers are going to roll out NDC content, so we’ll continue
to invest in our NDC program to bring in new entrants while adding
functionality with existing airlines,” O’Dwyer said.
“Now we are beginning
to pivot from focusing maniacally on content acquisition to what we actually do
with that content in the marketplace. It’s reductive to look to display every
single combination of offers on say London to LAX, so we want instead to ensure
we surface the best offers for each of our customers.”
The win-win-win
An effective marketplace
needs to work for everyone in the corporate travel relationship.
“Our customers are
looking for a consumer-grade experience, along with the value of a well-managed
program, underpinned by duty of care, servicing and reporting. Our business
partners bring the best content and unique offers,” he said.
These offers include
the “Preferred Extras” program, bringing added value with exclusive rates,
benefits and ancillaries.
“We always have to make
it a win-win-win for us, our customers and our business partners, otherwise the
marketplace does not work,” O’Dwyer said.
“If we can efficiently
merchandise their products and services and offer enhanced retailing opportunities
in a way that works for the airline, hotel or car rental company but also works
for the traveler, then I think it's a compelling offer for our partners to
engage with our marketplace and our customers.”
Channel flexibility
Amex GBT sees the
combination of channel flexibility and vast content, proactively curated by artificial
intelligence (AI) technology as a “best of both worlds” approach, offering the
personalized customer experience of the independent store owner blended with
the widest range of offers in the marketplace.
In a world of choice,
consumers want to buy in the way that suits them best. In travel, this means
via an online booking tool, email, phone or, increasingly, via hybrid chat
channels.
“AI-powered chat-based
booking channels are going to grow significantly within the marketplace. In
that channel, providing an offer quickly and making sure the AI is surfacing
the best offer based on choices that are in policy will help drive the kind of
trust that travelers currently have when engaging with a human agent,” O’Dwyer
said.
“We are putting a lot
of thought and investment into the shopping logic and displaying the most compelling
offers within the first couple of lines.”
How AI will deliver shopping
logic
That shopping logic
will be increasingly driven by agentic AI capability.
“We’re building agentic technology that interacts with you as a user in a
meaningful way,” said Evan Konwiser, Amex GBT’s chief product and strategy
officer. “Over time, we'll also interact with other agentic workforces, such as
your corporate AI or your agentic personal assistant.”
Konwiser
envisions how a typical business trip to Chicago might change in this
AI-enabled future.
“Your calendar knows you’re going to Chicago, and today’s AI assistant can
propose flights around those dates—but that’s not how people book business
trips. The first thing they think about when choreographing their trip is which
other meetings they can miss and which they can do while in transit. They’re
thinking about things like when they have to be home and what else they want to
do while there,” he said.
“Your agentic personal assistant will know all that.
The secret sauce is not an agentic workflow to simply book a trip; it’s a
workflow that predicts and managers the constraints that today are mostly in
your head.”
Folded
into this AI workflow will be the traveler’s personal preferences and corporate
policies. That
kind of insight would drive immense value for travelers.
“The algorithm also factors
where you stayed before, where colleagues have stayed, all that relevant history
integrated with pricing, policies, preferred rates and deals, and then delivers
the best choices to the top of your display,” O’Dwyer said.
Better integration of
loyalty benefits will also be an important part of the new customer experience
in the marketplace.
“In both the corporate
and leisure space, the loyalty benefits you have secured are generally not
reflected in the shopping process. If you've got status or a corporate
negotiated benefit that entitles you to free seat selection or priority
boarding, then highlighting those benefits as part of a user experience is
going to be very important to us going forward,” he said.
“We think we can
provide a much better user experience for the traveler—and better for the
travel buyer because travelers will select options that actually save the
company money because of the included benefits, while also being cognizant of
the benefits of booking within the program.”
Bringing everyone back
together
In October, Amex GBT announced a strategic
alliance with Concur to
launch a new integrated AI-powered platform called Complete, which will combine
booking, servicing, payments and expensing into one experience.
The intelligent marketplace provides the content bedrock on which Complete is built.
One of the advantages of
this marketplace will be the expense integration piece.
“We are investing to get
optimal visibility on leakage, which has been an issue since the start of managed
travel,” he said.
“Unless you have full
visibility of your spend, you can’t make the right strategic decisions for your
travel program. We are working to get visibility on the leakage on behalf of
our customers, reporting on it and then delivering actionable insights that
will ultimately end up saving our customers money.”
The move to an
AI-powered marketplace is not about removing humans from the loop.
“Yes, you will have an
AI-powered booking tool, delivering an excellent customer experience,” O’Dwyer
said.
“But if you need to
talk to a real person about your booking, you can do so. It’s a very compelling
offer. Our industry is built on the need for people to meet face-to-face: The
future is human, invisibly enhanced and enabled by agentic AI handling the
relentless logistics. Tomorrow's best travel experiences won't feel high-tech—they'll
feel effortless.”