American Express Global Business Travel increases visibility on travel program benchmarking

American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), announces the expansion and new features of its benchmarking tool, Peer Travel Insights (PTI). The innovative benchmarking functionality uses data and analytics to measure travel program performance and competitiveness. It is designed to help organizations better evaluate and optimize their travel programs and measure traveler well-being metrics.

Amex GBT initially launched PTI as a premium offering in 2019, but the new integration of five key dashboards from PTI into Insights dramatically enhances data for Insights users at no additional charge for Amex GBT Select and Neo clients. Insights is Amex GBT’s desktop application that includes highly configurable and easy-to-use reports. This significant feature enhancement makes benchmarking more accessible and valuable for smaller clients. The added dashboards include air (online adoption and advance purchase), hotel and car optimization.

John Sturino, Senior Vice President of Travel Products and Engineering at Amex GBT said: “The value of benchmarking is incredibly important – especially for companies moving from unmanaged to managed travel. Other tools will only give you numbers, but no insight as to whether those numbers are good. The PTI enhancements shows our continued commitment not only to offering solutions to the whole industry but ensuring that we are giving our customers the insights to most effectively manage the impact of travel – to their budgets, to the environment and to their employees.”

PTI includes 10 configurable dashboards based on more than 40 travel-specific KPIs, 16 industry groups, and 32 attributes such as costs for average room rate by city, average daily rental rate, and online adoption. It combines Amex GBT’s client database with advanced data science to allow clients to compare the competitiveness of their travel program to industry peers including traveler satisfaction. Businesses can gain immense value with having access to benchmarking tools, including:

• Compare across key KPIs to effectively measure how their program stacks up against others in their industry.
• Better at controlling costs by measuring whether their program is too stringent or too lenient.
• Competitive travel policies can help organizations attract top talent
• Fair and equitable travel policies can result in improved employee satisfaction and result in fewer fatigue-related complaints from travellers.

Another key feature of PTI is the Traveler Wellbeing Dashboard, which measures and compares traveller satisfaction metrics. The dashboard includes a traveller wellbeing score and provides better visibility of traveller satisfaction a business might want to monitor based on positive (e.g., business class on long-haul flights) and negative (e.g., redeye flights) aspects of travel.

PTI also includes an automated peer group generation (“others like me”) feature that offers clients the option to create a peer group based on similar characteristics such as industry, number of employees, air spend, percentage of online bookings and domestic economy flights. This feature creates a group that more closely matches the customer for a stronger and more statistically relevant peer comparison, vs just using industry as the group measure.

Amex GBT is committed to data privacy and security. Peer data provided is fully anonymized, ensuring complete protection of client source data. Amex GBT Egencia also offers competitive benchmarking features in its reporting tool including a Wellbeing Dashboard. For more information about Peer Travel Insights and other innovative solutions from Amex GBT, please contact your Amex GBT representative.