After hitting a 14-year high in 2019, passenger commissions paid by U.S. airlines to travel agencies bottomed out in 2020 along with passenger volumes, and stayed low through the first nine months of last year. The pandemic also changed the passenger mix, as mainly domestic leisure passengers made for a lower-value booking environment. Lower-value bookings…
TravelPerk’s valuation tops $1 billion partly because its per-trip costs are five times lower than those of traditional travel management companies, according to its chief commercial officer. “TripActions and TravelPerk are measured like Software-as-a-Service companies, such as Workday, Slack or Zendesk, and not like an Amex or a more traditional travel company,” said TravelPerk CCO…
When American Express Global Business Travel last month announced plans to go public during the first half of this year via a merger with a blank check company, it noted a set of “most relevant” publicly traded peer companies. These included the only public travel agency firm totally focused on business, Australia-based Corporate Travel Management,…
It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario as corporate travel management companies face hard decisions on staffing. When clients resume traveling, they need reliable, expert service more than ever. But with demand in doubt, how proactive can TMCs be in bringing back their people and recruiting more? It’s a question that begets more. How have agent roles been…
New York – Spotnana officials have been calling it the AWS of travel, but the reference only gets you so far outside tech and investment circles. Concepts like open stack and microservices help a little. In corporate travel, though, people want to know whether you are attempting to be a GDS, an OBT, a TMC…
After seven years with Egencia, $2.3 billion U.K.-based multinational events and research company Informa is targeting February to implement TripActions for workers in 28 countries. After the well-capitalized new entrant caught the eye of Informa’s travel manager of nearly 10 years, Melissa Willock, it bested four competitors in a roughly four-month bake-off involving six divisions…
That American Express Global Business Travel was growing relative to competitors was obvious before 2019. However, the presentation of numbers revealed on Friday that included recent acquisitions as though they were part of the group that full year crystalized for many industry observers the advantage that GBT’s scale is poised to deliver. That advantage will…
