American Express Global Business Travel on Wednesday introduced an end-to-end suite of new and enhanced accommodation products and services for clients and travelers including a new hotel rate guarantee and expanded mobile booking capabilities. The travel management company launched the effort, called Rest Assured Solutions, at the Business Travel Show in London.
The new products and services are designed to help entice business travelers to book in policy through designated channels by ensuring program benefits are communicated and by making the booking experience more consumer-grade.
Amex GBT began developing Rest Assured Solutions after acquiring Hogg Robinson Group in 2018, according to the company.
"What we've done the past 18 to 24 months is more traveler research than ever before," Amex GBT VP of hotel strategy Wes Bergstrom told BTN. "In the past, we focused on what was interesting to the client, and that's still extremely important. But we're also focusing on the end traveler and trying to understand what they are looking for from a hotel and lodging perspective. Why are they not booking in the program? We used a lot of data we gathered from our travelers."
As part of its as-yet-unreleased Hotel Traveller 360° research, GBT found that 73 percent of client traveler respondents indicated that cost savings were a good reason to book outside travel policy, and more than half believe they can find better rates in doing so. As such, GBT enhanced its Preferred Extras Hotel program with more benefits for the traveler, according to Bergstrom. These include making sure rates have discounts of up to 25 percent, include free Wi-Fi, breakfast, last-room availability, favorable cancellation policies and access to loyalty points and benefits.
The company also has introduced a hotel rate guarantee so "clients and travelers will receive the lowest rate at the time of booking than what they can find outside," Bergstrom said. "This is the first time we've offered a hotel rate guarantee because we feel so confident in the rates that we are offering."
Some of GBT's confidence comes from using its Hotel Assurance and Hotel Shop Expert reshopping technologies, in addition to the expanded content in the system, which includes more than 2 million hotel properties and 6 million non-hotel listings. "We have not only corporate negotiated rates but also the Preferred Extras Hotels program, access to Booking.com rates, Expedia rates, member-only rates that our big chain partners offer," Bergstrom said. "We feel we have everything from a packaging content perspective all in one place, so clients don't need to go anywhere else."
Payments also has been a focus for the company. It has made progress around its Virtual Payment Expert product with Conferma, and both GBT can service these transactions offline and online in more than 60 countries, for both global distribution system content and non-GDS content.
"This is a really big jump for us," Bergstrom said, adding that one of the elements that propelled this is single sign-on capability within Conferma for GBT's travel counselors. "We're the only ones that have this with Conferma. We're also focused on not just the virtual payment card, but also the [value-added tax] reclaim process, invoice chasing, reconciliation for our clients. That is something we have drastically improved upon in the last six months or so. We have an exclusive relationship with Conferma on its new Snap Plus platform over the next so many months."
In addition, the company has expanded its mobile booking capabilities. In some cases, its mobile app used to be just an itinerary service, Berstrom noted, but since November 2019 and using GBT's proprietary Neo online booking tool, "it has transitioned into full booking capabilities."
Combining these products—along with its Trip Recommender tool, which uses artificial intelligence to better understand traveler behavior and serve up travel options—plus "making payment easier on the traveler and on the corporation, that will really reduce leakage and drive savings as well," Bergstrom said.