With the recent launch of its new guest travel and expense
platform, American Express Global Business Travel has its sights set on both
broad and niche customer growth, adapting the tool to more specific use cases
but also opening its use beyond just Amex GBT customers.
Amex GBT announced
the platform—which lets event organizers and managers create events, invite
guests, set parameters around travel and manage expenses—last month, on the
heels of the launch of two competing independent platforms also focused on
managing guest travel: Juno
and EmPath.
All that activity demonstrates a broader need in the market for tackling guest
travel, Amex GBT chief product and strategy officer Evan Konwiser said.
Prior to the launch of Amex GBT Guest T&E, the travel
management company helped clients with guest travel via "a few different
solutions that were baked into our existing platforms," adapting the
managed travel workflow to handle guest capabilities, he said.
"That solved some use cases, but we've been hearing
from customers that those solutions weren't meeting their needs," Konwiser
said. "The standards and expectations of guests were going up, whether
it's a contractor or a recruit or an intern class, and some of those use cases
required more specific design and user experience around those."
Amex GBT built the new guest platform on its
small-and-midsized-business-focused Neo1 platform, which already had some
of the needed parameters such as setting budgets and enforcing that budget
through a central pay and virtual card program, he said. "We adapted that
piece of software very well and very easily and invested in making it fit for
purpose for this solution for guest travel," according to Konwiser.
At its launch, the platform was available for all Amex GBT
clients at U.S. points of sale, with the added benefits of servicing from the
TMC, he said.
"Everybody's booking and changing and doing what they
need digitally, but if you did need somebody to support your trip, that's all
available out of the box," Konwiser said. "If you need data to flow
into your broader TMC environment, that happens organically, so it has the best
of both worlds."
Eventually, Amex GBT is considering opening up the platform
further to non-clients. It would be an opportunity "to showcase our
capabilities" on a platform for which they could sign up in minutes, he
said.
"We are an industry that has gotten used to long,
complicated implementation times, but very nature is that users—whether you are
HR or guest traveler yourself—are not professional business travel
professionals," Konwiser said. "They don't want an instruction
manual, they don't want weeks-long implementations and they don’t want to
attend webinar after webinar on how to use it."
Following their respective launches, both Juno
and EmPath
announced specialization strategies for specific types of travel, such as media
and sports. Konwiser said Amex GBT is looking at additional enhancements to
integrate more tools into the workflow that solve for niche needs—such as for
health care professionals—building on the knowledge it already has from its
current clients in those areas.
As such, the tool stands to not only bring the TMC new
customers but also can increases business within current customers by reaching
out to different parts of the organization, he said.
"If you think about a professional services customer,
you have all these stakeholders within the organization that are very different
and that are interfacing with the travel team today, and they have needs that
are similar but also a little different," Konwiser said. "Having a
tool that can deliver what each of them need, and the travel program can give
it to their stakeholders and say you can do what you need to do easily,
efficiently and get a higher satisfaction and delight from your user group,
it's a win all around."