When responding in late August to competition concerns raised by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority over their proposed combination, leaders at American Express Global Business Travel and CWT must have held their noses. Their redacted response, released last week, showed that to get the deal approved, execs surmised they had to “big up” their competition, as a source for one U.K. trade publication put it

A close reading of the document produced several notable bits and rules of thumb — perhaps revelations for some.

  • Amex GBT and CWT estimated that they served 10 percent to 20 percent of the managed business travel market and handled no more than 20 percent of travel for global and multinational corporations. In a broader data set that GBT routinely receives from the International Air Transport Association covering a selected group of travel management companies, its share of 2023 managed travel air bookings was 20 percent to 30 percent. “GBT engages with its supplier managers responsible for different geographic regions to submit to IATA a list of TMCs whom they consider relevant competitors globally,” the parties told CMA. “IATA then provides GBT’s share, GBT’s travel partner network’s share and the consolidated total share for the identified competitors. The share estimate reflects GBT’s share in the global market for managed business travel.”

  • GBT and CWT are “increasingly losing” global and multinational bids to a “range of competitors.” The pair admitted that “no single TMC can provide an entirely ‘consistent’ service in every country” globally. “Even the larger TMCs, including the parties, provide global coverage through a variety of solutions, such as a proprietary presence, third-party networks and BPO solutions,” they wrote. “Some TMCs may be stronger in certain geographies than others. Some customers may also have local or regional preferences for certain TMCs.” Hundreds of multinationals are served “by many TMCs other than GBT or CWT.”

    The statements were designed to counter CMA conclusions including the notion that new entrants such as Navan and Spotnana cannot meet the needs of large multinationals. (Of late, Navan won business with global real estate firm JLL, according to sources who were not authorized to speak for the record. As of last week, Navan was also on the shortlist for business with Chevron.)

  • TMCs face an inflation-adjusted downward trend in revenue per transaction processed by large global and multinational clients.

  • Amex GBT serves many more small and medium-sized enterprises on a multinational basis than large global and multinational firms on a multinational basis.

  • Some customers use a lot of online booking tools. Without naming the customers, GBT cited examples of firms using as many as nine, 10 and even 14 corporate booking tools globally. “The strength of OBT offerings varies geographically,” it noted.

American Airlines is working to repair seamless, cross-carrier benefits for corporate travelers using Oneworld, said AA SVP of partnership strategy Scott Laurence during a September interview. AA planned to restart on Oct. 10 Corporate Experience, a suite of perks for travelers from contracted corporate accounts. For now, unlike Delta’s and United’s comparable programs, Corporate Experience will apply only for AA-operated flights.

Extending benefits to codeshare partners “would have happened more quickly, but we had to reset some of the IT work that we had undone previously,” Laurence said, referencing the carrier’s roughly 18-month experiment to revamp sales and distribution. “There is an IT list for everything that we do. It’s always a little bit harder when we do it with joint business partners because you’ve got a couple of different IT teams working there. That’s part of the constraint here as well.

“We did not want to slow down offering this, based upon the feedback that we were getting from our customers,” Laurence said. “We’re confident we’ll be able to offer it. We’re confident that, jointly, our partners will want to offer this as well.”

As for coordinated corporate sales with domestic U.S. partner Alaska Airlines, largely halted by 2023, an AA spokesperson in August indicated that the carriers continued “to have joint contracts with select corporate customers through our expanded network and our codesharing agreement.”

Something’s up with virtual payment and hotel check-in, according to a few frustrated travel managers who use Sabre’s Conferma to generate virtual cards for their programs. The gist is that when travelers with reservations using virtual payment go to hotel mobile apps to check in, the reservations default to forms of payment in the guests’ hotel loyalty program profiles, breaking the virtual payment.

A challenge with virtual cards is the potential presence of multiple payment processes for the same reservation and the subsequent need to align the booking record with the intended payment process. One answer would be for hotel mobile apps to notice a virtual card in the booking and not offer the card in the profile as an option, one payment insider explained.

Whether some corporate travelers will be able to check in is a “crapshoot,” said one buyer. According to an emailed statement attributed to Conferma chief product officer Stuart Davenport, the company is “not aware of this issue” but does “appreciate this as a potential friction point for the travel industry. … We will be allocating resources to continue to educate our network and constantly innovate, which in turn will drive hotel acceptance rates.” Multiple buyers said Conferma personnel knew of the issue but claimed there was nothing the firm could do about it.

According to a GBTA survey conducted in February, 27 percent of 186 travel buyers in North America and Europe indicated their programs used single-use virtual payment. Of those, 74 percent expressed satisfaction, while 4 percent said they were dissatisfied.

Reaction: Thanks for recent comments from readers, including Gordon Coale, Chris Dane, Tony O’Connor, Eric Bailey, Scott Gillespie, Mike MacNair, Craig Fichtelberg, Nicole Del Sesto, Richard Clowes and Steve Reynolds.


Around The Web

 Here’s coverage in Business Travel Executive of multinational travel management’s “daunting list of hurdles” from the August BTE Town Hall event co-hosted by The Company Dime.

• Recent articles in Bloomberg and The New York Times were down on artificial intelligence. Harvard Business Review published research in June showing that as they accomplish more tasks with AI’s assistance, employees feel increasingly isolated from colleagues, less satisfied in their jobs and less motivated. Nevertheless, Bloomberg showed how AI is impacting a corporate travel-adjacent field. Here’s the latest on AI for finance and AI at SAP from CFO Dive and CIO Dive, respectively.

• Scary stuff on airline safety courtesy of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.


Updates

Delta has not offered a comment, but we got word that it’s investigating a fix for the unused ticket ownership issue we covered here in July.

Gant Travel acquired Aimendo, an AI tech firm it started using two years ago.

Hotel Engine, which we profiled last year, announced $140 million in new funding and plans to book flights and rental cars. It is valued at $2.1 billion and will also change its name to Engine.

Travelport last month announced a “multi-year” Delta agreement “including NDC content.” We reported in August that Delta was working on multi-year, full-content agreements with the major global distribution systems.


Go Figures

According to Sustainable Aero Lab, the first iteration of its Net-Zero Airline Ranking, published this summer, showed a “sobering reality: The airline industry is significantly off track from achieving the goals set out in the Paris Agreement, with genuine commitment to net-zero ambitions being extremely limited across the board.”

The report mentioned a “significant gap between rhetoric and reality,” and suggested that aviation’s net-zero outlook was “more of an illusion than a viable reality.”

United Airlines topped the ranking, partly due to “industry-leading efforts” to fund sustainable aviation. According to the report, the carrier has the “most substantial” sustainable aviation fuel offtake agreements, the most investments in relevant startups and a dedicated climate fund of $200 million. United, though, received a zero (lowest possible score) for fleet modernization.

None of the other five U.S. carriers on the list achieved a score of one (highest possible score) in any category.

The report’s authors were hopeful that the airline industry would voluntarily and transparently report on net-zero commitments. “This is barely the case today, where even basic sustainability figures, such as current SAF fuel consumption shares, are hidden in airlines’ annual company reports,” they wrote. “We leverage mostly hidden yet publicly available information to assess genuine net-zero commitment. This is crucial in an industry often clouded by greenwashing initiatives that offer little to no meaningful CO2 reduction.”

Lennart Dobravsky, founder of Sustainable Aero Lab research partner Research+Attitude, wrote on LinkedIn that the rankings don’t track investments in eVTOL or supersonic aircraft as part of an airline’s green investments, “as these don’t align with net-zero tech.” He noted that the methodology “intentionally biases toward disruptive innovation over incremental improvements like route optimization, cabin weight reduction, etc. Why? Because these incremental changes will naturally occur. However, they won’t get us to net-zero on their own by any means.”



Pithy Wisdom

Paul Swanston, UATP

“As you look to migrate into NDC, are you departing from access to enhanced data? Many have become accustomed to enhanced data, which is cost center, employee ID, etc. Those are appended to the financial data by somebody — a technology provider that you likely have been partnering with, or somebody that’s in that space that’s helping you with that, even a GDS. Probably the TMC is sending it to the network, and it’s being married with the financial data. You might be allured by the idea of a more direct relationship. Disintermediation sounds good, right? It sounds like less cost, but you could be walking away from really rich data. You’ve just walked away from the provider that was bundling it all for you and putting it in a package with a bow on it. You won’t have that.”

Paul Swanston, UATP managing director of global network sales, at GBTA’s July 2024 convention

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