American Express GBT upgrades benchmarking tool

American Express Global Business Travel has upgraded its benchmarking tool to offer more data to clients including traveller wellbeing and peer group metrics.

The TMC’s Peer Travel Insights (PTI) tool was initially launched as a “premium” product in 2019. But it is now integrating five dashboards from PTI into the Insights platform, which is offered to Amex GBT Select and Neo clients for no additional charge.

Insights is a desktop application allowing clients to create configurable reports. Adding dashboards from PTI is designed to make “benchmarking more accessible and valuable for smaller clients”.

PTI’s dashboards include air, hotel and car rental optimisation, as well as providing “better visibility” of traveller satisfaction. This includes the ability to monitor the impact of different kinds of travelling experiences, such as taking business class on a long-haul flight versus flying on a “redeye” overnight flight.

Clients will also be able to use the automated peer group generation feature, which allows them to benchmark against similar organisations, based on factors such as industry, number of employees, air spend, percentage of online bookings and domestic economy flights.

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.”