American Express topped the Power List for years until the advent of OTA giants Expedia and Priceline. As of mid-2014, it became two companies: publicly held American Express Travel, which retains the traditional group of leisure-oriented agencies and a franchised network, and privately held Global Business Travel, a joint venture for business travel operations owned 50% by American Express and 50% by an investor group led by Certares.
The two companies functioned together as one agent of record for the first six months of 2014, then split into two agents of record for the remainder of the year. Because of the complexity of the new arrangement and for the sake of consistency, Power List for this year continues to treat American Express as a single entity, with $29.9 billion in total sales.
“We have a representative network and will continue to do so,” said Claire Bennett, executive vice president for American Express Travel. “Our franchisees will become even more important to our business. Our primary relationship with business travel before was on the supplier and partnership side. As far as customer service, we always tended to be somewhat separate.
“Trips are more complex, and we need the tools that allow us to help the customer the most — and to maximize card benefits,” she said. “Cardmember benefits are now communicated to visitors throughout the site."
American Express is No. 3 on the 2015 Travel Weekly Power List.
At Global Business Travel, Philippe Chereque, chief technology officer, said, “The world is changing a lot, and business travel is being done online and becoming more global. We wanted to evolve our model to enable us to invest in the technologies we need. I don’t believe travel management companies have been very good, for instance, at evolving with mobile tools.
“I joined the company in September,” Chereque said, “and we have acted on the fact that with business travel you cannot have an online solution on one side and an offline solution on the other. That’s why we are trying to converge them, ensuring that data is common between different channels.
“With a company worth $1.8 billion at its inception,” he added, “we can evolve as a multichannel platform that puts customer and provider data in the center of our systems and enables a better travel experience for business travelers. You want to be sure that if an employee of a major corporation made a booking in the U.S. that they will be supported while in Asia.”
View American Express' entry in the 2015 Power List.
This report was updated June 22, 2015, to clarify Certares' relationship with Global Business Travel: 50% of the company is owned by an investor group led by Certares. Also, the report was updated to correctly report the combined sales of American Express entities: it was $29.9 billion in 2014.