Success Story

Quick, simple, and effective support during disruptions.

Aug 09, 2024, 3 minutes read

We keep it simple

We care about your business – and there’s nothing simple about that.

When you book with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), you get a ticket and a dedicated team. Our best-in-class, 24/7 service is at your fingertips across travel disruptions or pivots.

Juggling dispersed teams and clients isn’t simple – travelling for business should be.

We’ve spent the last 100+ years building relationships to bring you the largest central marketplace for vendor value and choice without compromising on our 24/7 service. Travel can help your business grow and we care about making each trip experience as simple as possible.

Problem

A global IT systems outage from a major IT provider left thousands of our customers’ travel plans thrown into chaos in July 2024. This led to days of disruption before travel began returning to normal and with an influx of 70 thousand customer inquiries across our support channels, it took 4 days and a collective 1,049 hours of overtime to make sure all our customers got to where they needed to be.

Solution

Our best-in-class traveller care, effective technology, and commitment to providing tools and systems that allow us to deliver a high standard of duty of care for travellers, meant that Amex GBT teams and products became the obvious choice to support and simplify travel during disruptions.

Result¹

Within 30 minutes we globally identified and blocked the defective system patch.
We deployed two thousand extra support hours to assist customers and their travellers and adhere to a high standard of duty of care they expected.
Across 4 days, we supported travellers with 100 thousand delayed and 13 thousand cancelled flights.
We proactively supported over 4,315 travellers.

“Amex GBT’s committed service and proactive app technology meant that I was kept up to date with any travel disruptions during a recent trip. Not only did I feel confident travelling, but I was reassured that my teams were also receiving a high standard of service whilst mitigating global travel delays.”

Mark Cuschieri

Head of Global Travel Management, at UBS

Harnessing the strength of people and technology

Our hybrid approach to technology simplifies travel into the largest accessible central marketplace for vendor value and choice, with proactive support service when you need it most. In times of disruption, it’s a simple three-step process. We notify you of the effects it has on your travel and ask if you need support, you reply yes, and we get straight to it – helping make every trip count.

“I’m very proud of and grateful for our travel counsellors from around the globe who responded quickly to thousands of travellers in desperate need of our help. Many travellers told us how much they appreciated the specialist assistance [Amex] GBT provided to get them home or arrive on time for an important meeting.”

Mark Rude

Senior Vice President, Traveller Care at Amex GBT

Landing the right message with customers

Our solutions offer in app technology that proactively allows for direct communication to travellers in times of disruption. Meaning that for many of our customers during this recent global IT event, our proactive push messaging not only notified them of disruptions to their travel and rebooked them automatically onto the next flight, but also connected them with travel support to discuss their movements in more detail.

“Our commitment to building innovative technology that lasts a lifetime, not just for a moment in time alongside our shared responsibility for excellent duty of care means when travel is disrupted, we are ready to take action, provide reassurance, and get people to where they need to be. Our approach utilising tech to supercharge our already industry-leading service sees us paving the way for a technology-led travel future.”

David Thompson

Chief Technology Officer at Amex GBT