“It is our view that by 2030 everything changes in corporate travel and payments,” Armstrong said while delivering the keynote at The Beat Live event in New York.
Blockskye, a PhocusWire Hot 25 Travel Startup for 2024, offers an end-to-end corporate travel management solution in partnership with Kayak. After spending 2024 in an innovation period, the company raised $15.8 million in July, bringing its total funding to $33 million.
Armstrong outlined areas of corporate travel he anticipates will experience major shifts in the next five years.
Content, shopping, servicing, payments
Around 10 years ago, industry stakeholders started to hear "noise" about varying prices and capabilities offered by online booking tools in tandem with travel management companies. But that is starting to quiet down across shopping and content for managed programs that have adopted direct content APIs from suppliers, Armstrong said.
He also said the functions, features, offers and split payment options that are currently available in suppliers' own channels are going to rise over time.
That will put pressure on channels that don't offer the same breadth of solutions offered by suppliers.
"It is not going to be tenable to say at scale to your customers or travelers, 'Sorry, we're working on that,'" he said.
From a servicing and commercial perspective, companies will have to offer content and shopping that features everything suppliers have in their own channels.
Blockskye, he said, anticipates artificial intelligence (AI) will play a heavy role in servicing.
Armstrong expects that—in the long term—direct content APIs and AI will help travelers with self-booking and itinerary changes, decreasing the amount of agent interactions. In the immediate, near and medium terms, he said AI could help agents, shortening interaction times and making resolutions more precise.
He also predicts self service will be faster due to the personalized content travelers can access. Most transactions, Armstrong said, are going to be shopped, booked and serviced by travelers.
While Armstrong identified credit card company American Express as historically dominant in the payments market, he insinuated that new payment alternatives are likely to make a splash.
The merging of payment data and travel data
Armstrong also discussed how he thinks data will become more cohesive.
“So data as it exists today: You have [an] agency mid office, back office. You've got the credit card. You have the expense report,” he said. “You have what the traveler thinks of their own trip, in their email, etc., all these things they'll really reconcile.” he said.
And while those points might come together in some kind of annual report, Armstrong said that currently is never “at 100%.”
Armstrong said the payment is the data that matters, and he anticipates the merging of payment data and travel data to be increasingly emphasized, becoming "a base requirement" by 2030.
"Payment data is the most crucial data," he said. "It can't be wrong. For example, some companies expense their travel to their clients—the margin of error here is zero, especially if that client is the government."
A changing corporate travel space
Armstrong said the corporate travel sector is already seeing some of the aforementioned trends play out, before referencing market speculation that Amex GBT is considering a sale, a headline that made waves in the industry late last month.
“This is going to be the biggest drama [in the] next three months, so my hat's off,” Armstrong said. “We're all watching.”
There’s potential for a “back to the future” moment, where travel could become part of the payments market, he said, nodding to Amex GBT’s historical relationship with the American Express card.
“Lastly, the sort of fresh thing that we see as well … is that a lot of these partners are going to actually be paying each other per transaction,” he said.
That means third-party suppliers would have a per-use contract versus an annual contract.
“So, these would be agentic payments,” Armstrong said. “It's something that we think heavily about. It also reflects the merging of data, travel data and payment data, so that servicing payments and all the intermediary technology is all shared in one data source.”
Tags: Brook Armstrong, Blockskye American Express card business travel payments
