Amex GBT Aims to Shed 'Legacy TMC' Label

Amex GBT's David Reimer talks...

Why Amex GBT is "no longer a travel management company"Progress with NDCClient response to looming sustainability target deadlines

While American Express Global Business Travel generally gets classified with "legacy" travel management companies, the company’s executives of late have been pushing back on that classification. Speaking last year at The Beat Live, for example, CEO Paul Abbott said being referred to as a "legacy" or "establishment" TMC was "self-serving rubbish." Amex GBT EVP of global clients and Americas general manager David Reimer spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker during the recent Global Business Travel Association annual convention in Atlanta about the company's transition to a "software and service company," along with an update on staffing, sustainability efforts and its new accessibility offering. Edited excerpts follow.

[Editor's note: This interview took place a week before Amex GBT’s announcement that it was pushing back the projected completion date of its acquisition of CWT as U.K. regulators conduct a deeper probe on its market impact. Given the additional context, questions related to the acquisition were not included in the transcription.]

BTN: Have you completed staffing recovery coming out of the pandemic?

David Reimer: Our business is in the best possible shape. Our access to talent has never been better. Our attrition rates from a servicing point of view are at the lowest they’ve ever been. We are getting and maintaining the best talent in the industry. It’s so rewarding to turn up this week here [at the GBTA conference] and hear from every single one of our customers about the phenomenal job our teams did in accommodating them in the issues of the past week. I would tell you if I'd heard something else, but I just haven’t. There’s always talk about product, about technology, about AI, but I think the human element of business travel and travel in general is just such an important part. Being able to work through this week, accommodate customers, and get them on other airlines, get them to their meetings and get them home, having the talent in the industry to go do that is the exclamation mark in terms of servicing, where it’s at and having the right talent. 

BTN: Over the past few years, we heard of a reticence from some on returning to the travel industry. Is that still the case?

Reimer: We’re beyond that. Overwhelmingly, people are returning. The are passionate about service, what we are delivering for our customers. We are over that very quickly. If I look at GBT specifically, some would like to categorize us as a travel management company. We are no longer a travel management company. We are a software and service company, and that is what we do in the B-to-B space. That’s also the opportunity that really allows us to attract different people. We have now over 1,000 developers with fingers on keyboards developing stuff, and that’s a marked change over the last several years, and we’re continuing to build that out. It’s not just about somebody picking up the phone. We are a software and services business, and that is what we do, whether that be through what we’re delivering to customer with Egencia or Neo, but that is absolutely what we’re focusing on. 

BTN: Are you seeing a greater move by your customers to your own technology?

Reimer: Ultimately, what we think about is really providing unrivaled choice for customers and getting the content through our marketplace. The reason we talk about choice is it’s not just important to have that own technology but to provide choice. If I think about that choice, some customers will want to go and configure their own program. That’s the GBT Select offering, to go out with Concur and a number of different products: Cytric, GetThere. There’ a whole bunch where people can go and bespoke their own program. If you have a look at someone who’s got relatively less complex requirements, they can go out and use the Egencia product to do that. If you think about what we have with Neo as a solution is really being able to invest in that control. With Egencia and Neo, we can do that with both those products. We can move faster on things like [New Distribution Capability] and innovation in general on user experience, and we have that direct access with our customers, and we listen to that feedback. That really allows us to make sure we have the best products in the industry. We still have 79 percent of our transactions online. Sixty percent of those are on our product platform, Neo and Egencia, but 40 percent is a really important number to us and our customers, and GBT will continue to offer that choice. 

BTN: What’s your progress report with NDC?

Reimer: I couldn’t be prouder on the progress report. We’ve got over 20 airlines active in terms of our NDC program. We’ve got over 10,000 customers accessing that through Neo and Egencia, both online and offline channels. This is something we remain committed to. We are offering that content. Where we want to be and our role is to make sure we are in a position where a customer doesn’t care whether it’s an EDIFACT fare or NDC content. Our job is to simplify that and offer that broad array of content.

BTN: Has customer adoption been in line with your expectations?

Reimer: I would say it's broadly in line with expectations whether they're selecting those fares or not. We don’t really care. We just want to serve it up to the customer. They’ll have their policy, and the traveler will be able to make the decision about what works for them. That could be EDIFACT or that could be NDC. The end traveler wants choice and to travel in the most efficient and cost-effective manner, and that's our mission. 

BTN: What are some of your key projects related to AI?

Reimer: We've created a separate team. AI is not foreign to GBT, whether it's in terms of providing choice to customers, how we're displaying content—it's been around for a long time. As the technology is evolving, the way we're really thinking about through this new group is how do we improve customer service. How do we use it in a customer service environment to allow agents to deliver a better experience, to have them focused on what matters in those moments of truth when customer need them the most? There’s financial—what are the financial capabilities within GBT. Also, from an engineering perspective, there's a lot of great tools we've adopted and use cases for developing faster and better quality, making sure our employees have those tools. Then, we’re working through number of different use cases at a customer level, where it would be automation. This isn't a destination. This is something that is here. When people are using our technology, using AI to give people choice to where we’re looking at data of people who have traveled within their organizations with similar profiles to give them choices, or based on their own profiles, that is all AI-enabled. The proactive traveler care that we do, being able to notify and reach out to customers is also AI-enabled. The choices we serve up during disruption are AI-enabled. So, we have a nice balance in terms of focusing across those areas.

BTN: How has your role evolved with your clients’ sustainability efforts?

Reimer: With sustainability, nobody's claiming victory. I see a continued commitment from broadly the industry and specifically from all of our customers, so it remains an absolutely focus area. This is truly an area where we need to come together as an industry. What customers are asking for is how to they go about meeting their net zero targets for 2030 or 2050. Specifically for them, they're thinking about how they're educating the travelers at point of sale. I see customers taking a keener interest in aircraft, how much is somebody burning on a particular flight; what does that mean? Certainly reporting and visibility, there’s a huge amount of importance. I think we led the industry with the partnership with Shell to come up with the Avelia product. Really, it's going to take multiple solutions across the industry to solve this, but that’s been an interesting one for both of us. It does allow a different way for accounting for [sustainable aviation fuel] as an offset, being able to track that in a unique way and report against it. That’s not going away anytime soon, and nor should it. We're all world citizens of a planet that needs our help, and it's our job to go out and address it. 

BTN: Have you seen any signs that customer interest in sustainability is waning?

Reimer: I don’t think it has. What we're seeing from customers is they’re interested in navigating in their own organization, trying to work out who the stakeholders are from a travel perspective, who I should go talk to and how should I do that. If you’re in a professional services firm, that could be different from a manufacturing firm. We spoke at the need as the industry continues to evolve and change to elevating the conversation at a C-suite level. We’re just starting to see the beginning of it. As dates and targets come due, people are going to put more emphasis on it. We've held the interest as an industry, but as those targets come, you’re going to see a more aggressive push for companies to want to understand how they're abating emissions and solving for their company targets.

BTN: You launched a new accessibility services offering this year. How has that been progressing?

Reimer: We’re progressed that solution with more companies. That's another key one as an industry, because it's really important if somebody does have an accessibility issue and matching that whether it be through the airlines or hotel rooms, and understanding the different types of things you're trying to solve for. Getting visibility to travelers at the point of sale is really important, make sure you have bespoke solutions for companies who are required to access that content. If you think about the great period of fragmentation we have in content from hotels, a particular room night not just be a room that requires disability access but a room that can’t be near the elevator for noise sensitively issues. It's knowing that but then also being able to access that content to view it. There's a whole lot more that needs to be done. I know GBTA has championed that, and so have some of our customers. Andrew Slaiby at Raytheon is doing a great job to bring that together at an industry level. We've got some wonderful examples with Google and others where we've been able to create bespoke solutions that allows them to add that offering to their employees. It doesn’t matter what the accessibility issue is. It does give them that option to travel and make them feel more comfortable to travel to know they are going to be accommodated and get the support they need to have an effective trip. There’s still a long way to go, but I'm really proud of what we've done as a company.