American Express Global Business Travel’s UK VP and general manager Anthony Drury talks to Paul Revel about control, compliance and crystal balls…
With the rise of new forms of online business travel services, do you see the
Anthony Drury joined American Express in 2002, and has held a range of sales and senior management positions around the world within Amex. In summer 2011 he took up his current role as UK vice-president and general manager of American Express Global Business Travel. Prior to this, Drury was VP and head of sales for
Europe, and before that for APAC. He has a corporate sales background in IT, travel and tourism, engineering and financial services. Drury has held a range of positions, including general management, sales management and technical product specialisation. Before joining Amex, he held a variety of roles with Online Advantage, Fleet Systems and Alstom. When he was appointed to his present role, Drury and his family relocated from Sydney and now live near Guildford.
model for the travel management company (TMC) changing? From the hotel-booking perspective, to have a fragmented supply chain is a
American Express predicts a rise in business travel prices; compounded with the economic climate, how do you see this affecting behaviour? It is going to change behaviour – people have got to start buying smarter, and
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making sure they’re getting some kind of return on investment. But prices have been going up steadily over the past couple of years so it’s not a huge step-change. In conversations we’ve been having with our customers over the last couple of months, they’re looking at how they can squeeze their budgets in light of the economy. We’re helping customers look at a variety of ways they can meet their targets. Policy and compliance are key – they’ve been the hot topics recently. Businesses need to adjust travel policy to suit the climate, and change behaviour inside their organisations. The last thing anyone wants to see is the downturn being compounded by everyone stopping travelling – it’s about doing the right kind of travel, and how they can maximise value from their spend, whether consolidating to one agency or rationalising spend through one group of suppliers. There are many channels through which you can maximise value from budgets.
concern in my mind. You can’t supply the level of security, tracking and monitoring/reporting processes you can from a GDS [global distribution system] perspective. Aggregation of content is important – fragmenting your booking channels is not best practice. We’ve been talking to, and educating customers over the years about consolidating one market and one channel – I think the more fragmented the booking process, the more risk involved.
What’s key for your business in 2012? Mobile technology and connectivity is the flavour for this year. One app rather than
many is the key – one that covers every part of the supply chain is critical. The mobile product we launched earlier this year is being rolled out across the customer base. The next wave is our mobile communications management system. Lots of our customers already use our Trackpoint system, which locates travellers via their PNR [passenger name record], and the next stage is visually tracking a traveller via his mobile. It’s really about employee security: travel managers can track exactly where a traveller is in an emergency. We’re starting to roll out this system in Q1 this year. We’re also seeing further development of tools such as our customisable pre-trip auditor, incorporating duty of care and compliance aspects. It can be configured so that if, for example, you’re flying a number of people to an oil rig in Russia, it can automatically flag-up if that number means security, insurance or tax implications for your company. It’s about more than just
authorisation to travel – it’s driving compliance. It’s utilising data to the next level. That’s why I’m concerned about fragmented supply chains: you miss out on these benefits – data capture and utilisation.
Do you predict changes in where people from the UK and Europe will be
travelling to do business? Our forecast highlights Latin America and the JAPAC [Japan and Asia-Pacific] region – we expect this growth to continue for a couple of years. From a niche perspective, we’re seeing the mining, oil and gas industries driving increasing demand into unusual locations around the world.
Many travel buyers still cite transparency in commercial agreements as a concern – what’s your view? In the years I’ve been with Amex, we’ve always had a transparent model, so I don’t see it as an impact. Look at the majority of our customer base – they’re large corporations, and we have a transparent model with them. It depends on what financial model they’ve asked for in the RFP [request for proposal], whether we’ve built commissions into their model, what’s passed back... Regarding mark-ups, we leverage our buying power on our net fares for the middle market. The bulk of our travel is booked on corporate card platforms, which allows them to be transparent.
What’s your take on controlling ancillary fees? It’s about how the customer deal is constructed. A customer who has a strong controlled programme has an understanding of what the ancillary fees were in the previous year. You can build them into a simplified model if you have the quality of data. Customers have been asking for better prices and unbundling, so we’ve all