2024 sales: $30.48 billion
Previous ranking: 3
Employees: 18,000
666 Third Ave., Fourth Floor
New York, New York 10172
Phone: (212) 329-7200
Website Executives
CEO: Paul Abbott
PRESIDENT: Andrew Crawley
CFO: Karen Williams
COMPANY FACTS
* Publicly held company.
* A software and services company for travel, expense and meetings and events.
DEVELOPMENTS
* Entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CWT, which it expects to be completed by the end of 2025 after meeting customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.
* Its Egencia solution was recognized as a software leader with 19 badges at the G2 awards.
* Featured more than 20 carriers in its NDC program with that content available to more than 15,000 customers; it processed almost 1 million NDC tickets across 16 point-of-sale countries.
* Streamlined spend management for small-to-midsize enterprises. New AmEx and Amex GBT integration provides better visibility and control over employee spend, including budgeting, purchasing with virtual cards, booking business travel and streamlined expense processing.
* Made progress internally and externally with agentic technology.
* Continued investing in proprietary AI architecture to scale initiatives with appropriate data privacy and governance; created an AI initiative to increase focus on driving purposeful innovation and greater efficiencies for clients and the business travel ecosystem.
* Launched GenAI use cases in finance, product engineering and servicing, including large language models-driven chat functionality for Egencia in 18 countries.
* Built an emissions-based carbon pricing solution, helping customers to create a self-supporting fund for sustainability initiatives and incentivizing more sustainable economic decisions.
LOOKING AHEAD
* Working to integrate travel, expense and payments to deliver an easier experience.
* Investing in tech and features such as GenAI to offer options and create a one-stop platform.
* Integrating AI further into its platforms to optimize customer interactions, predict travel disruptions and provide more personalized recommendations.
* Building AI into customer experience flows and preparing human counselors with contextual information about travelers and their needs.
* Launching new thought leadership to help small-to-midsize enterprises grow.
* Company believes that the business travel industry has been resilient, even in challenging macroeconomic conditions. Business travel has consistently grown with or above gross domestic product, and it helps facilitate trade by enabling personal interactions and connections that are invaluable for negotiating deals and ensuring smooth operations across borders.
* Among the trends it's watching: Distributed teams and hybrid work models will further become norms, creating new demand for business travel and meetings and events. According to the Flex Report Q4 2024, 68% of U.S.-based firms offer some form of workplace flexibility, reinforcing a long-term shift away from in-office mandates.
* Its 2025 meetings and events forecast predicts internal meetings will continue to be the most frequent meeting type. In a survey of the company's top 100 customers, 66% said their budgets for meetings and events are increasing this year.
* Businesses will focus more on Gen Z employees' experiences and needs since that age group will represent an ever-larger proportion of the workforce (and traveling workforce) over the next five years. To attract and retain talent and future-proof strategies, it will be important for businesses to understand Gen Z's feelings and expectations about traveling for work.