American Express Global Business Travel is launching new tools designed to help travel managers and travelers deal with flight disruptions, the company announced.
One new feature is in the travel management company's Proactive Travel Care in-trip assistance service, which monitors travelers' trips and notifies them via an automated messaging system of delays or cancellations. Now, the service can send travelers recommendations for alternative flights. After selecting their preferred option, travelers then are connected to a travel counselor to complete the change, Amex GBT VP of product strategy and user experience Mark McSpadden said.
The update also enables travelers to connect to Amex GBT travel counselors through WhatsApp, in addition to the currently available Amex GBT Mobile app chat and SMS channels.
The alternative flight recommendation currently is available to select U.S. customers and will be available worldwide by the end of this year, according to Amex GBT.
Additionally, the TMC has added a new dashboard on its cloud-based reporting tool, Insights, that gathers data on disruptions from the PTC service for travel managers, such as the number of flights affected, airlines with the most delays and cancellations and the percentage of travelers who are engaging with the service. The dashboard, now available worldwide, lets travel managers track how badly disruptions are affecting their travelers and improve duty of care, Amex GBT said.
"As we've been talking more and more to travel managers about the disruption environment, they have very little insight into what's happening, especially in aggregate," McSpadden said. "We saw an opportunity for them to be better informed as to what's happening at the program level."
With the dashboard, a travel manager for example can identify whether they need to discuss widespread problems with a certain airline or route, or they could reach out to a traveler who has been facing multiple disruptions, he said.
Amex GBT also has added a feature to its mobile app that makes it easier for travelers to keep colleagues, clients and family updated on trip disruptions. The feature, now available globally, lets travelers generate a link to an Amex GBT webpage that provides live tracking of a flight, and recipients can refresh that page to see the latest flight information. That way, travelers do not have to send continuous flight status updates to contacts themselves.
"When we talked to travelers about disruptions, we found that the whole communication aspect—letting a client, team or their family know what's going on—had become a whole separate thing to manage, so we thought we could bring some cohesion to that," McSpadden said.
The features come as travelers face an increase in flight disruptions this year, with travelers this year about twice as likely to face delays as they were last year, according to data from FlightAware.
Amex GBT said it plans to release more disruption management services in the coming months, including more chat channels to connect with travel counselors, check-in surveys after disruptions and third-party service offerings.