American Express GBT is adding artificial intelligence to its hotel sourcing. The TMC’s consulting arm has indeed announced the Hotel Lobby solution, which involves integrating AI agents into its hotel referencing service. Data cleaning, calculation of target rates – «wish rates» – and the validation of tenders: all these often time-consuming steps are automated, leaving time for Amex GBT consultants to focus on strategic and negotiation aspects. And this without having to multiply requests to conversational assistants, since this multi-agent system itself runs the entire sourcing process.
To do this, AI agents can rely on benchmarked negotiated rates covering thousands of hotels as performance indicators from suppliers representing more than $5 billion in hotel spend. A sourcing method that, according to the TMC, can generate an average of 28.8 % savings on the best available rate, with 96 % responses from hotels on more than 80,000 properties consulted each year.
Towards continuous hotel sourcing
By reducing preparation time, the Hotel Lobby feature aims to shorten sourcing cycles to achieve optimization of hotel programs throughout the year, rather than through a single tender per year. Amex GBT believes that this solution lays the foundation for «continuous monitoring throughout the year,» in order to preserve the negotiated value well after the tender closes.
