Amex GBT Readies for Lasting Environment of Travel Disruptions

Amex GBT EVP David Reimer discusses:

Why travel disruption is '"here to stay"Recruitment to ensure consistent serviceGetting ready for a September travel ramp-up

American Express Global Business Travel earlier this month released new tools aimed to help travel managers and travelers better handle flight disruptions. The travel management company's global EVP of global clients and general manager for the Americas David Reimer spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker during the recent Global Business Travel Association in San Diego about the level of disruption Amex GBT's clients are seeing and its strategy to help them manage through it—as well as how the company is keeping staffing levels apace to handle the growing problem of travel disruption.

BTN: How long will the current climate of disruption persist?

David Reimer: Disruption is here to stay. The industry is required to go out and recruit 40,000 pilots. We know a lot of the less efficient aircrafts have been retired. We know the newer aircrafts are slower to roll off the production lines, whether it be the Dreamliner or Airbus A350, we know that it’s production related issues, and it’s much, much slower. You have airlines wanting to go back to full schedules but little resilience when you have a bout of Covid somewhere. It will continue. So, you can do two things: Hope it gets better or do something about it.

What we’ve done is done something about it by making sure we are focusing on that traveler experience, and that’s been centered around how can we help them when they are disrupted. We’ve just made a significant investment on disruption tools. We really enhanced that [Proactive Travel Care] offering. We’ve added not only through the GBT mobile app, but we have it through WhatsApp. We’re allowing people to get that proactive nature, where if you are disrupted, you will be contacted and served up options, so you go in and solve before you’re getting on a plane that’s no longer going to take off, working out where you’re going to get to next. While everybody else is queuing up, we have you booked and accounted for, and you are on your merry way to wherever you need to be, whether that’s an important business meeting or back to your family.

In addition to that, there’s nothing worse than your partner wondering where you are. Getting that link and being able to send it out to important people, whether it be colleagues or family, so they can click on real time and see where you’re at and what’s happening, that’s a unique feature. Rather than having to text 50 of your closest friends, you can give the link, and it’s refreshed in real time. On top of that, layering in what we’ve done with our Insights product, giving travel managers that insight to see, you know what, [a certain traveler] has done 10 trips in the last two months, and that poor, poor man has been disrupted every time. Can I give him an upgrade certificate? Can I see that it’s on a particular route and get a trend to give the traveler advice? It’s really providing access to information that lets travel managers add real value to the travelers. 

BTN: What can it mean in terms of program decisions?

Reimer: They can make different choices about their program. If they book one airline that’s consistently late or cancelled, you might want to remove it from the program until you’ve got stability. Information is power in managing through that. Trying to pull all that together and not having the strategy and not communicating with your travelers and giving them tools that help make that experience better is going to count against companies. Companies thinking about people being away and needing to get places, you want to do that in the best possible way, and we’ve seen that through some of the other research we released last year, in terms of what that employee experience and expectation is. It’s never been higher. We passionately believe that a managed travel program has never been more important or relevant. 

BTN: Does it tie in with profile management?

Reimer: When you set up a profile, you set up do you want a text message, call or email, so you get an approach that's very personal to you. It's about providing that choice for your travelers. Using it is phenomenal. If I'm on a United flight, and that's cancelled, and the next one is in four hours' time, and there's an American flight that gets you there three hours earlier, you can have that choice. That's the superpower of the TMC, being able to give that choice and get them where they need to go. Depending on what the situation is, your whole day could be kaput because the meeting that you were going to or the event you were going to be at, you're not going to make it. It's nice for the employee, but it's great to drive business and commerce.

BTN: How is Amex GBT faring in terms of staffing during these disruptions?

Reimer: It has been a challenge across the industry. Although we had employees on furlough, as did a lot of our industry, we kept connection with those people, we supported them through a difficult time and we were able to get back a little over 87 percent of those agents. That core level of experience and that core focus on servicing excellence that is expected of American Express, we really have been able to [retain] that core DNA.

Over the last two months, we've recruited over 800 travel counselors. We've put in place a very significant employee incentive. If somebody refers somebody, and that goes through to somebody starting at GBT, we pay $2,500. Then, if they refer a second person, and that person starts, they get another $5,000. It's putting our money where our mouth is to attract the best in the industry, and we've had significant success on that both here and also globally. We're very happy with where we are.

That doesn’t' mean that you get all the right people in the right place in the right time. We've seen that when you have disruptions, there are still strains on the system, and the strain is less about recruitment and more about what's going on. You have Schiphol shut down, you have industrial action at Heathrow, you have a 100,000-passenger cap going through Heathrow, which nobody really knows how to manage because systems aren't in place to manage these things. That's where you get the stress on the system more than people. Having that steady strategy and recruitment pipeline is critical. We've also worked with two major employee agencies globally to supplement that. We have our human resources department adding more people outside of their core jobs and deferring them back to pure recruiting functions. 

BTN: Are you recruiting largely within or outside of the travel industry?

Reimer: We've had some [from outside the industry], but we've been ultra-successful within the travel industry, and given our profile of customers, that's very important. We still put those people through the very rigorous training program. We still as a requirement comply with bank holding company regulations, making sure that focus on data privacy and security and compliance generally is an important part of that, to make sure they're ready to go on the phones. The training is more on meeting that standard than bringing them in to teach them about travel.

We also recognize that you want to grow people in this industry and bring them in, and that's a focus to bring flexibility and choice of benefits. With flexibility, we've long been a pioneer of the work from home concept, so that's not new to us. Being able to jump straight into that without skipping a beat has been pretty easy, because we've been that way for over 10 years and have the systems and processes to support it. If you don't, it's hard to set up: Making sure people have the right equipment, training and that they are safe and capable of working at home. 

BTN: What level of increase are you seeing in transactions that require agent support?

Reimer: The average handling time has gone up, whether you are a first-time traveler and want your hand held, or whether it’s just because you're being disrupted and need help, all of those drive volume into the system. It's the unexpected nature becoming more expected. What we've done really well at is the partnership and support from our customers, thinking about what we can do together.

We've had active plans for over 12 months knowing this was likely to be an outcome. How do we get more travelers online? How do we communicate and get information in their hands? We've been working with customers in advance to know we're coming to the busiest period of the year, so let's not have everyone turn up Sept. 1 and start booking the hell out of everything. How about we get those messages out and encourage people to book early? Not only is that good from an experience point of view, it's more likely going to have success from a savings perspective as well.

We're really partnering on how we communicate that together. We always had phenomenal partnerships, but I would say over the last three years, they've strengthened immeasurably. Things will continue to change. What are the right staffing levels and models? This is an active daily and weekly conversation, and that's the level of focus you need to drive that customer experience. The proof will be in the pudding as we get to the busiest part of the year. We're looking at how we build out additional centers and capacity and models as well.

BTN: How is consolidation with Egencia and Ovation going?

Reimer: For us, it’s always been about giving our customers choice. If you think about what we’ve built pre-Covid and post-Covid, we’ve wanted to make sure we’re a one-stop shop for all of our customers. People have a view that travel is this amorphous thing, and business travel is business travel.  The view we’ve taken is recognizing that different companies with different travelers with different profiles are going to need different solutions. We have a very clear strategy that we want to provide companies and their travelers with choice.

If you want to go out and have something that was highly online, highly digitized and configurable at a travel manager level, that was the Egencia solution. We feel that was the pedigree, fully digital shop. It’s been out there, and it’s proven and truly global and backed by a phenomenal technology. If you want something that is super-high VIP—and there is a difference between VIP and super-high VIP—that is really going to be Ovation, and we continue to grow that. We’re rolling out that program globally in other markets and making it core to our solution. If you want something that is highly configurable, highly global and is works exceptionally well, that is going to be Amex GBT, that really solution-orientated approach, that allows you to put in the spoke requirements globally and at a market level, to make sure you’re covering culturally what you need from a business outcome. GBT is not just a house of brands, it’s a house of solutions for each of those different segments.

BTN: We saw CWT release a new subscription-fee model earlier this year. Do your clients have interest in such a model?

Reimer: We've got a number of different models out there that we offer. Subscription models are not foreign to have in our toolkit, when it makes sense. You need to have commercial models that support some of the ebbs and flows in the volume we've seen, and that's good for the customers, so they can get the support they need, and good for us that our shareholders and company gets the economic return they need. There are a number of different models that have come out of Covid-19, and they're here to stay.