Interview : Adrien Cannes, American Express GBT Consulting

What do you take away from the latest EVP barometer published by American Express GBT?

Adrien Cannes - Business travel is a means of acting in person. We therefore tried to take a step back and look at the value of a meeting compared with a videoconference, a telephone call, a chat, etc. We were able to conclude that business travel is valuable and necessary as a means of interacting in person, because despite the crisis 91% of travel decision-makers consider it to be a necessity for the company, or at least very important. Despite the crisis, companies have managed to find opportunities from an economic and operational point of view. But both travel decision-makers and travellers are waiting to be able to interact again.

What do you think about the importance of sustainable development?

Adrien Cannes - Four or five years ago, it was still at an embryonic stage in the discussions. Today it's a real issue to be considered and dealt with. But the way it is dealt with is still immature. There is no standard, no practical norm within the company.

What about the duty of care?

Adrien Cannes - There has been a return to the human touch. Before the crisis, the focus was on digitalising the user experience and making it more autonomous, in order to get closer to a BtoC environment. With the crisis, the number of human interactions within GBT has doubled, as a palliative for this aspect. duty of care.

Will a TMC still be able to cope with such high offline demand in 2022?

Adrien Cannes - We're still capable of doing that, but it's not the strategy of the industry, or indeed of any company. The aim is to be digital, innovative, and closer to BtoC. The target is the end user. What the purchasing and finance departments want is for the tools made available to be fully adopted by all employees. We had the resources to manage the crisis from a human point of view. Our backs were strong enough to cope with this situation, and we'll have them to deal with any future ones that may arise. We're going to continue along the path of digitalisation, to offer the right OBT, the right settings, a good user experience, but we'll always have the option of managing crisis situations and repatriations as a stopgap, if need be. That's what we do!

What role did your consulting division play? What were your customers' needs?

Adrien Cannes - Our teams worked hard during the crisis. People were undecided, they had no visibility, they didn't know what to do. So we had to help them define a short- and medium-term strategy.

On what specific issues?

Adrien Cannes - For example, customers were in complicated situations with direct supplier contracts. It was a question of integrating operations, the financial health of these suppliers, whether or not they were able to move employees, and the preservation of contracts from a financial point of view into relations with suppliers... We helped many customers to manage their contracts We had to respond to this urgency. More broadly, it was a question of understanding the general vision of travel. As a result, the travel manager found himself managing much lower volumes of travel, and was therefore able to undertake some fundamental work. For example, by questioning the relevance of their reporting solution, to track travellers effectively in real time, or to offer more alternatives in terms of CO2 emissions. These are issues that have come to the fore because there has been time to reflect on them. The review of travel policies has gone well beyond the annual review, with new challenges and new expectations among travellers. When we talk about new generations of travellers, it's not because it's a fashionable subject. We carry out analyses of our customers' traveller populations and behaviours, and there are now 30% millenials. And these employees don't travel or interact in the same way as 'boomers'. The crisis has also enabled us to sit down with our customers and redefine these kinds of strategies.

Are these issues now closed? Perhaps the Ukrainian crisis has replaced them?

Adrien Cannes - Some customers took up these issues at the start of the health crisis, in particular because they had deadlines to meet in terms of project schedules. Others tried to hold out for a few extra months, hoping for a return to normal. As a result, there are still delays in updating our customers' strategies. As for the crisis in Ukraine, it has had less of an impact on our travel philosophy. It shows, if proof were needed, that travel is not in a world apart, that everything is connected, that energy governs the logic of every business in the world, including business travel. There have been geographical and operational impacts, but I think the most profound crisis has been in energy, with an impact on pricing.

So how do you reconcile rising fares with the desire to improve comfort for business travellers?

Adrien Cannes - It's a complex equation: people, passenger comfort on the one hand, price on the other, and sustainable development... We'd all like to have the solution. It varies from company to company, geographical area to geographical area and individual sensitivities. Some companies allow travellers to 'under-classify' themselves, by favouring premium over business, which generates not only financial savings but also carbon savings, and to reinvest these savings via an association. Two years ago, at American Express GBT, we incorporated into our methodology the carbon impact differential according to travel class, aircraft occupancy rates and freight/passenger ratios. This feeds into the Green Compass tool, which enables us to establish the trajectory to be adopted for each company, to truly achieve its objective of decarbonising business travel. As far as price rises are concerned, if this is linked to the increase in kerosene prices, and if technology evolves in the future, whether with hydrogen, eco-fuels or rail, the impact of petrol prices will no longer be the same for business travel. A fare increase is therefore a significant factor, but it should not be a determining factor in the trajectory we take to innovate and find technological and technical alternatives. We are at the beginning of the innovation curve. The first few years are tough in terms of investment, for SAF as for any technology. But the curve will flatten out over time. And we've seen all kinds of factors driving up prices: when a company stops operating on a strategic route, prices go up. During the crisis, the introduction of all these health protocols also had an effect, particularly in the hotel sector. So we can't simply isolate one factor driving up prices.

How will we be able to return to the same pre-crisis travel levels in 2023-24 despite the adoption of new habits?

Adrien Cannes - Some indicators may fall: the number of trips per company, the travel budget as a function of a company's income, etc. But companies are always being created and growing. From a macroeconomic point of view, the growth in wealth produced will be fuelled by and linked to the growth in the total volume of travel. The sharp fall in travel during the crisis has perhaps demonstrated the incompressible level of travel volumes required for a company's economic activity, and this will grow with the growth of the company, the economy, the population and technologies.