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CWT’s Vournakis discusses:
- Preparing for the Amex GBT acquisition
- Merging AI, messaging and travel policy
- Moving from “learn” to “do” with sustainability
With its looming acquisition by American Express Global Business Travel likely later this year, CWT is maintaining a “business-as-usual” attitude in its operations and development—as evidenced by such post-acquisition announcements as its special services for travelers with disabilities and expanded messaging capabilities. CWT chief customer officer Nick Vournakis spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker during the recent Business Travel Show Europe about how CWT is preparing for the acquisition as well as its ongoing initiatives in AI, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.
BTN: What is the status of the acquisition, and how is it affecting CWT?
Nick Vournakis: The timing is still pretty consistent with what we expected. We’re going to go through this process where the regulators will take a look and weigh in with their approvals on the deal, but we expect it will go through. There’s no reason to believe it necessarily won’t. In the meantime, we are still operating as two brands.
I still love waking up every day seeing CWT on my business card, but I’m really excited about what’s to come. I think about this as a great opportunity the idea that overnight, we will have a whole host of new capabilities we will be able to offer to 4,000 customers all around the world. It’s a process. Until then, we’ve operated since day one as business as usual.
CWT Plans Broader Scale for Special Assistance Service
CWT’s recently launched Specialty Assistance service for travelers with disabilities is the first step in enhancing the TMC’s capability in ensuring special needs are met for a wide spectrum of travelers, CWT director of service design Stephanie Lewis said.
The service was born as CWT had started to see more diversity, equity and inclusion-focused demand from clients in requests for proposals, she said, with accessibility the “hot topic at that point.” About a year of work ensued, with gathering data and identifying service gaps and pitfalls to address what could build off services CWT already offered.
“We have always supported travelers with disabilities,” Lewis said. “We just haven’t had a really formalized program around it.”
One of the main focuses of the program is booking, as the “inconsistencies are pretty vast” among suppliers’ accessibility offerings, she said. As such, one of the first steps was building an internal data repository of preferred suppliers and creating a live access point at the point of sale for travel counselors to access that information.
“Suppliers offer different services and call them different things,” Lewis said. “You have to translate that into a booking experience, making it as quick and easy as any booking process.”
The booking process also has a “safety network” built in to ensure that travelers can trust that the needs they booked are met. Within a day or two of travel, counselors check in with suppliers to make sure everything has been booked properly and needs will be met.
CWT also enhanced its global profile tool to capture better specific traveler needs such as wheelchairs, service animals and seats for caretakers.
“We wanted to avoid travelers having to repeatedly tell travel counselors what their needs are,” Lewis said. “As needs occur and change, travelers can manage those requirements, and our counselor base routinely uses that throughout the process.”
In addition, the program has a “feedback loop,” not only so CWT can continue to improve its own services but also to gather information on suppliers and ensure that they are meeting needs as advertised, she said.
Training for the service has included educating counselors in avoiding ableist language, she said. Building on research both with third-party consultants and with CWT’s own counselors who have disabilities, the TMC has developed an hour-long training module for employees. That is built on by workshops both with leaders and with group discussions, where counselors who work in the program can share their own experiences and help build best practices, she said.
The initial phase is largely focused on travelers with physical disabilities, which is the biggest demand at the moment, but the idea is for it to be an “evolving solution,” Lewis said. As it focuses on addressing needs as opposed to disability—two people with the same disability might have different specific needs in travel, after all—it could easily expand to address specific needs of women or LGBTQ+ travelers, for example.
“The solution was always built with scale in mind,” Lewis said. “The training can be adapted, and the format can be used as we start to bring in different travel demographics.”
We do have two totally separate dedicated teams on what transition planning looks like. We’ve done acquisitions before; they’ve done acquisitions before. This is a known process. We’re not venturing into uncharted territory here. The sentiment from customers and prospects has been pretty reasonable. This is not a cataclysmic event. We’re not the only one consolidating. I think there is more of that to come. More than anything, we continue to see this industry evolve into this people and technology world. It’s a whole rationale set behind the announcement of our partnership with Spotnana last year.
BTN: How is that partnership progressing?
Vournakis: We’re up and running now, live with a couple of customers. There are more in the pipeline. It has evolved in exactly the way we expected it to. It’s a platform that excites people, and they see as the experience of tomorrow that’s available today. And that’s great for the industry.
BTN: Amex GBT highlighted AI use cases in MyCWT as one of the “significant opportunities” in the acquisition. What has been developing there?
Vournakis: If you think about the travel experience today, there’s such a shift to what we call messaging. Historically, you had interconnected but pretty standard channels: I’m going to send an email request, I’m going to call or I’m going to go online and make the booking. It’s taken a long time for this industry to get to the point where there’s just a different way to interact digitally. What we call messaging is just a chat or IM capability, and that requires some investment. Ultimately, you want to be relevant in the channel that’s relevant to the corporate traveler.
We’ve built out these connections to WhatsApp and Slack and Microsoft Teams. We have it resident in MyCWT, so that you can start having an asynchronous kind of conversation about travel needs in a much more modern way. AI is a great facilitator for that. We use AI on the front end of that as a great enabler to identify intent. If you can identify intent–”I’m stuck” or “My flight was just canceled” is a different trigger than “I’m looking for was copy of my itinerary”—you can use AI to start siphoning work to the right location. The copy of an itinerary, we might be able to punch them out straight to their [online booking tool] and press the button for a copy. [If you’re] stuck, you need to talk to somebody.
The amount of uptick we see now, we have messaging deployed to over 1,000 customers. The [satisfaction] ratings are off the charts, well over 90 by comparison, and this is a channel that is going to become the norm at some point. So, the relevance and the growth of that type of travel experience [needs to be] managed in a corporate context. That messaging capability, it all has to be congruent with what the policy says, so when we start talking about getting to automated action, you’re going to have to have this governor. The agent that might be involved knows the travel policy, the dos and don’ts and what you’re supposed to do. To build that into the automated acting is a next step. It’s going to come at some point, but we’re still several years away from crossing that bridge.
BTN: Do you think different regions will have different levels of acceptance of using such tools?
Vournakis: It may be regionally driven, but I think it will be more demographic- or profile-driven. There’s a huge booking community that are executive assistants around the world, and the way they differ by region is really interesting. Especially in Asia/Pacific, you have a set of needs and demands that are a lot different than what we would see in the States. Messaging is not for them. They love email. “I’m taking care of 10 people. I want five doing this, a different five doing that, we have this set of preferences for these two, another set for these two and this set of preferences for these six.”
I think the adoption is really going to be driven by demographics. If it’s a newer-generation business traveler, they’re going to be all over that. They’re going to look at an [online booking tool] as clunky, as a stupid piece of technology.
BTN: CWT also recently launched a special service for travelers with disabilities. What drove that, and how is it progressing?
Vournakis: We’ve seen so much change in capability around data and reporting, around the visibility of sustainable travel within OBTs and the booking process. But I get a little bit more interested in some of the evolution around DE&I.
We are going to embrace this idea that there’s a community of travelers that have existed forever but have been tremendously underserved. CWT has made some investments in this area, and I know other travel providers have as well. It’s really prevalent in the supply chain ecosystem. We have a specialized service [see sidebar], dedicated email and phone number available in more than 20 countries, but the idea is that I have to train some of my people differently. We’ve created a proprietary repository for all for this supply chain, how they serve this community. The fact is that we can now help normalize this to some degree. This needs to be recognized in the travel management community.
The first corporate I saw do something really meaningful around this was Google many years ago. They were very purposeful about building policy for this group of their Googler community. What does that mean, how do we serve that? It forced us to start thinking about what we have done and what we need to do as a rule. How are we going to organize service capabilities. I think those types of things have really changed and become a lot more important in terms of what managed travel looks like. We’re always talking about the shiny new toys, but to me, it’s really more about, how is the experience itself changing? These are some of the dynamics that will be long-lasting. These are meaningful changes to the travel experiences that I think will outlive all of us, to some degree, in terms of what’s managed.
BTN: What are you seeing from clients in terms of sustainability?
Vournakis: It’s getting to the point where it’s becoming more and more routinized. Reporting capabilities are fantastic now. [So are] visibility capabilities: How do I make an informed decision or know this is a more eco-friendly hotel. What I think Is more interesting now is, what is everyone doing with it?
I was speaking to one of our customers yesterday, and she’s knee-deep in trying to actually reduce emissions. It starts with understanding, but then what decisions do you take? One of the use cases we were discussing was this idea that between the U.K. and the East Coast, it’s better for them to get somebody from London to Philadelphia instead of flying direct for a [lot] of money in business class, they can choose a more economical business-class product between London and New York and then use a car service, and it’s a better footprint.
We’re finally to the point where we’re at “do.” At one point it was “learn.” It’s impossible to do if you don’t know what you don’t know, but we’re at the point where we know. What are we doing? Are we changing behavior? What can you do in terms of managing your program that’s going to make a difference? Think about when everybody made their commitments. 2025 is right around the corner. We’ll see if those Scope 3 reductions are really gone. Are we really neutral? Offsetting isn’t going to get us there. Who is ready to invest in [sustainable aviation fuel]? I’m excited to see that as an evolution.