American Express Global Business Travel is investing more in its ambitions in the small and midsize client segment. The company this week launched Toolbox, a digital platform that puts a "freemium"-model consulting service in the hands of SME travel buyers. It’s targeted to companies in which the person who manages travel may have a broad remit and is not fully focused on the category.
“A lot of times, travel is a small component of what they do,” said Amex GBT VP of consulting Dan Beauchamp. “They are being asked to do more with less, but travel is a catalyst for growth for their business. So there’s an oxymoron going on and, with all that, I would suggest they rarely to never have the budget to buy strategic consulting services.”
Yet, SMEs do have opportunities to optimize their programs, and according to GBT, Toolbox can serve as a gateway to rationalize the delta between investment in optimization versus payback, which has frustrated buyers with more modest spending levels.
The digital consulting platform is configured with an upfront survey that level sets the maturity of the users’ program. Based on the survey, the program receives a score driven by some artificial intelligence-powered analysis operating in the back-end of the interface. Once the analysis happens, the Toolbox retrieves background learning resources from the Amex GBT consulting stash, plus, the Toolbox pushes out some benchmarking dashboards based on aggregated SME data across the Amex GBT client base. It identifies areas for improvement. They can make changes and re-assess on the tool as well.
The Toolbox doesn’t stop at the freemium level—which is available to any Amex GBT client. A deeper “pro”-level Toolbox comes with a fee and more detailed analysis of the program under the consulting microscope. Program areas under analysis currently range from hotel programs to sustainability, and functionality like a travel policy builder will be particularly interesting for small and midsize companies looking to put controls around travel.
GBT has faced headwinds in the SME market since last year. With Neo and Egencia, the company narrowed in on a growth strategy that delivered handsomely post-pandemic as SMEs ramped pent-up travel demand and surpassed global and multinational companies as a growth segment for the mega TMC, according to GBT’s full-year 2023 earnings.
That growth has been “muted” in 2024 and 2025. Earnings reports from the third quarter of 2024 to today have pegged year-over-year SME growth at around 2 percent. GBT executives noted in those calls that pullback in SME spend has not been limited to travel but has crossed more generally to other business spend categories as well, “driven by higher prices and lower macroeconomic growth.”
In recent months the TMC has continued its push towards SMEs, creating a new executive position to help drive growth and product development for the sector. It has also produced research that showed “high-growth” SMEs travel more than “followers.”
Asked whether the freemium nature of the product was meant to act primarily as a lead builder for GBT’s recent and more aggressive pitch into the small and midsize market, Beauchamp responded:
“Honestly, we are not expecting this to drive too much from a revenue perspective. It really is about how can we help elevate our SME travel programs and get incremental stickiness and daylight between our SME offering and others.”
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Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Amex GBT's consulting Toolbox was available to companies that are not current GBT clients. That was inaccurate. Only GBT customers have access to the tool. BTN regrets the error.