Business Travel’s Next Move at The #Phocuswright Conference 2025
Summary
This panel from The Phocuswright Conference 2025 explores the evolving dynamics of corporate travel, featuring Evan Konwiser (Chief Product & Strategy Officer, American Express Global Business Travel), Steve Singh (Executive Chairman and CEO, Spotnana), and Caroline Strachan (CEO, Festive Road), moderated by Alicia Schmid of Phocuswright.
The session opens with the landmark GBT-Concur partnership. Strachan, speaking from a buyer consultancy perspective, advises corporate clients to "just breathe" rather than panic, arguing the deal is a natural fit given the companies' tens-of-thousands-strong shared customer base. She notes that while mid-market TMCs may have cause for concern, buyers should expect net positive outcomes. Konwiser frames the partnership as a direct response to years of customer feedback: clients want Concur's solution to work in ways that meet their traveler needs, and GBT is now positioned to collaboratively build more integrated solutions. Both Konwiser and Singh agree that partnerships are an output of strategy, not the strategy itself.
Singh articulates three structural shifts he expects to reshape business travel within three to five years: (1) search expanding to include conversational AI, already accounting for a meaningful share of bookings; (2) content distribution moving toward direct, personalized supplier-buyer relationships; and (3) servicing evolving to an "agentic travel agent for life" — an AI that knows the traveler, their family, their employer, and every city they visit, delivering predictive and proactive support.
On traveler experience and corporate policy, Strachan introduces the "Disney effect" — corporate travel has two customers (the company that pays and the traveler who books), analogous to Disney's dual marketing to parent and child. She argues that corporate travel policy is largely a "red herring," observing that policies littered with the word "must" are routinely ignored because there is no enforcement mechanism. She summarizes the universal traveler need as three things: "know me, be where I am, tell me only what I need to know." The "be where I am" principle points to integrations like Amadeus's Microsoft Teams booking capability — travelers want to interact from within Slack or Teams rather than switching to a separate booking tool.
Konwiser echoes the need to rethink "policy" entirely — framing it instead as "the manifestation of the company's culture into what you can buy as a traveler." He notes the Venn diagram of what travelers want and what companies will pay for has more overlap than most assume, and that AI-driven integrated solutions will surface that common ground more effectively.
Singh cautions that truly personalized recommendations require building comprehensive data graphs around buyers, their families, and their companies — and that the industry is not yet there. His benchmark: 95% accuracy on the first recommendation. By contrast, he argues most search engines and social media deliver 95% irrelevant content; business travel AI must invert that ratio. He estimates this capability is two to three years away.
On AI adoption, Strachan highlights GBT's McKinsey/Skylink implementation as a proof-of-concept that has given other travel managers confidence. She contrasts ambitious tech-sector clients ("give me everything yesterday") with more cautious organizations, and describes a change-management framework — traditional vs. transformational ways of working with a "comfort zone of change" in between — that helps buyers pilot AI innovations. One pharmaceutical client mandates AI training for all employees with consequences for non-compliance. Konwiser observes that consumer use of agentic AI for medical questions and daily life is organically training the entire ecosystem, accelerating corporate risk tolerance. He notes that within a single year the default customer response has shifted from "I need a human agent in 30 seconds" to "if it doesn't work they'll find another way."
The session closes with the panelists predicting supersonic travel's return and arguing that face-to-face interaction will become more valuable, not less, as AI creates time savings that humans can redirect to genuine connection.
Key Takeaways
- •Corporate travel policy is largely unenforced — the word 'must' appears constantly but with no consequences, meaning demand management requires active behavioral design, not written rules.
- •The universal traveler need reduces to three demands: know me (personalization), be where I am (embedded booking in tools like Teams/Slack), tell me only what I need to know (progressive disclosure).
- •The GBT-Concur partnership is a direct response to sustained customer demand; buyers should wait and observe rather than react with alarm, as the structural logic is sound.
- •Three forces will reshape business travel within five years: conversational AI search, direct personalized supplier-buyer distribution, and agentic lifetime travel assistants.
- •AI personalization requires building comprehensive data graphs covering the individual, their family, their company, and their TMC before recommendations become trustworthy — the bar is 95% accuracy on the first recommendation.
- •Corporate travel has two customers (company buyer and individual traveler); effective product and policy design must serve both, as Disney markets to both parent and child simultaneously.
- •AI adoption is being de-risked organically: consumer habits with tools like ChatGPT are training the enterprise workforce to trust agentic AI, compressing the corporate adoption curve.
- •Open, interoperable infrastructure is a prerequisite for seamless in-trip experience — most current systems do not communicate with each other, causing service failures at the worst moments.
- •Change management for travel managers means mapping moments across the full trip lifecycle (think, plan, prepare, book, on-trip, expense reconciliation) and identifying which are suited to native AI versus human-first intervention.
- The Venn diagram overlap between what travelers want and what companies will fund is larger than commonly assumed — integrated AI solutions can surface and exploit that common ground.
Transcript
Well, welcome and thank you um Evan, Steve, and Carolyn for joining us here today. And good job on sitting in order because I had you guys in the completely wrong order, didn't I, back there? Uh so today we're going to talk about uh business travel. It's back, right? Pre- pandemic. Maybe not quite the same as it was before. Um I don't know about you guys, but I feel like now more than ever, change is more of a constant and a norm than anything. So, I don't see any point in tiptoeing around anyth...
