American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) announced the expansion and new features of its benchmarking tool, Peer Travel Insights (PTI). The benchmarking functionality uses data and analytics to measure travel program performance and competitiveness. It is designed to help organizations better evaluate and optimize their travel programs and measure traveler well-being metrics.

Amex GBT initially launched PTI as a premium offering in 2019, but the new integration of five key dashboards from PTI into Insights dramatically enhances data for Insights users at no additional charge for Amex GBT Select and Neo clients. Insights is Amex GBT’s desktop application that includes highly configurable and easy-to-use reports, according to the company. This significant feature enhancement makes benchmarking more accessible and valuable for smaller clients. The added dashboards include air (online adoption and advance purchase), hotel and car optimization.

John Sturino, senior vice president of travel products and engineering, said: “The value of benchmarking is incredibly important — especially for companies moving from unmanaged to managed travel. Other tools will only give you numbers, but no insight as to whether those numbers are good. The PTI enhancements show our continued commitment not only to offering solutions to the whole industry but ensuring that we are giving our customers the insights to most effectively manage the impact of travel — to their budgets, to the environment and to their employees.”

The benefits of the benchmarking tools include:

• Compare across key performance indicators to effectively measure how their program stacks up against others in their industry.
• Better at controlling costs by measuring whether their program is too stringent or too lenient.
• Competitive travel policies can help organizations attract top talent.
• Fair and equitable travel policies can result in improved employee satisfaction and result in fewer fatigue-related complaints from travelers.

Another feature of PTI is the Traveler Wellbeing Dashboard, which measures and compares traveler satisfaction metrics. The dashboard includes a traveler wellbeing score and provides better visibility of traveler satisfaction a business might want to monitor based on positive (e.g., business class on long-haul flights) and negative (e.g., redeye flights) aspects of travel.

PTI also includes an automated peer group generation (“others like me”) feature that offers clients the option to create a peer group based on similar characteristics such as industry, number of employees, air spend, percentage of online bookings and domestic economy flights. This feature creates a group that more closely matches the customer for a stronger and more statistically relevant peer comparison vs. just using the industry as the group measure.