Trends & Insights
Now's the time to revisit your hotel program.
As the landscape begins to stabilize – and corporate demand patterns become clearer – travel buyers have an opportunity to look at their hotel program and ask if it is meeting their goals. We’ve identified four key areas for the future of your program.
Smaller programs should think big.
Viviana Lowe, a manager in Amex GBT Consulting’s hotel team, says small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and companies with smaller travel programs can win by taking a strategic approach to sourcing hotels.
Concentrating spend on a handful of preferred suppliers could give SMEs the volume to negotiate attractive rates. You can drive significant discount and work with your hotel suppliers to secure amenities that are valuable for your travelers such as free W-Fi, free parking, or breakfast included.
In recent years, hotels have been flexible about cancellations but now it’s not uncommon for them to stipulate a 72-hour policy. Work with your hotels as a partner and you should be able to find a reasonable half-way, like a 24-hour policy.
Remember that hotel providers want your business and are intensifying their focus on SMEs: in the last year, globally recognized hotel brands - including Hilton, Marriott, and Accor – have announced dedicated services to support you.
A final consideration: take advantage of your TMC’s preferred programs to get competitive prices and amenities, making use of the technology and data available to you.
Meetings have evolved; How you manage them needs to evolve too.
With meetings fully recovered, Linda McNairy – global vice president at Amex GBT Meetings & Events – considers how consolidating transient travel and meetings management can deliver better events.
At Amex GBT Meetings & Events, we’re seeing most meetings return to in-person formats. Attendee numbers are rebounding, or even surpassing, pre-pandemic levels and internal team gatherings, customer board meetings and special events are on the rise. But this resurgence is not simply replicating past patterns; meetings today are occurring with shorter lead times, heightened levels of attention on attendee experience, as well as increased organizational focus on environment, social and governance priorities.
While companies carefully track hotel data for their transient programs, meetings data is more complex and difficult to monitor resulting in many organizations having less visibility into the meeting specific hotel data. A consolidated approach to travel and meeting management data could unlock rich insights to drive keener decision-making and optimize your events.
It’s true that transient and meetings exhibit distinctly different behaviors. For example, instead of booking sleeping rooms on a global distribution system (GDS), the meetings function reserves rooms via contractual obligations and off-line rooming lists. Tracking total spend is also more complex when you add in food & beverage, meeting room charges and audio visual spend. But these challenges can be overcome through partnerships – underpinned by honesty and transparency – between stakeholders. It's a real advantage if you can work with a single partner that combines transient travel with specialist meetings management - and can offer robust data capabilities.
TMC view: Traveler choice at the heart of hotel.
Simon Fishman, vice president global hotel at Amex GBT, shares his vision for traveler choice in the accommodation program.
Choice defines retail in the digital age; as consumers, we expect the brands we shop with to give us rich, meaningful choices that match our needs and values. And, of course, we bring those expectations to work.
At Amex GBT, we’re laser-focused on creating a marketplace with unrivalled choice where business travelers have the freedom to make policy-compliant bookings based on the things that they care about. After all, no one likes an option of one. And when we don’t give travelers choice, we’ve seen how they tend to roam off the online booking tool and break policy – with all the implications that has for duty of care.
For one traveler, choice might mean selecting the cheapest price; another, will prize an elevated experience that comes with their loyalty status. In some cases, the traveler might select their corporate’s negotiated rate. In others, they might find a better deal - with the right mix of price and amenities - through additional content provided by the TMC. Whatever rate they use, our goal is for the guest to always be recognized as an Amex GBT traveler and receive the seamless hotel experience that comes with that recognition, something we’re working with our hotel partners to deliver.
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