To speed hotel sourcing with agentic AI, Amex GBT launches ‘Hotel Lobby’.
Hotel Lobby, an agentic AI feature within its hotel sourcing consultancy service, was introduced by American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), a software and services provider for travel, expenses, and meetings and events. It is intended to facilitate ongoing, year-round program optimisation and reduce sourcing cycles.
For coverage, negotiation, and sourcing, Hotel Lobby employs specialist AI agents that may assist in automating labour-intensive processes like data purification, wish rate computation, and RFP validation. The multi-agent system automates the sourcing process, allowing our crew to concentrate on the times when human judgement truly matters, in contrast to conversational AI copilots that merely answer questions. It uses supplier performance measurements from over USD 5 billion in managed hotel spend, negotiated rate standards from thousands of locations worldwide, and compliance trends from Amex GBT’s clientele.
With over 80,000 hotels found each year, Amex GBT’s well-established hotel sourcing technique yields an average discount of 28.8% off the Best Available Rate and a 96% property response rate. The similar procedure is used by Hotel Lobby, where human judgement and AI automation coexist. Experienced hotel sourcing consultants are still in charge of strategy, negotiations, and exceptions while AI agents handle the heavy lifting of data.
According to Sara Andell, Director of Consulting Strategy at Amex GBT, “Hotel Lobby gives you the rigour of a full sourcing cycle and the speed to spend more time negotiating. Backed by rich proprietary travel data and years of consulting experience, our AI agents now handle the data work, compress sourcing cycles, and free our consultants to focus on what actually drives savings.”
Despite the continual changes in hotel pricing, demand, and traveller behaviour, many travel programs continue to use a single yearly sourcing cycle. This results in missing savings between RFPs, coverage gaps, and compliance drift. Teams may begin the sourcing cycle with richer data accessible and finish it more quickly since Hotel Lobby handles the data prep and saves time. Additionally, it establishes the framework for ongoing, year-round monitoring that safeguards negotiated value long after the RFP expires.
Amex GBT’s larger agent-to-agent (A2A) architecture, which is currently operational across its travel servicing and booking products, is based on the same ideas of trusted data, governance, and transparency as Hotel Lobby. It is the first of several AI-powered improvements that Amex GBT Consulting will implement in the upcoming months. When combined, these features are meant to facilitate proactive, continuous management of travel program expenditures. Additionally, in order to provide clients with a more integrated perspective of their programs, the company wants to further integrate them with its current reporting and intelligence capabilities.
Forrester’s independent study, which was commissioned by Amex GBT earlier this year, reflects the greater potential for more coordinated travel management. While 92% of IT decision makers believed that AI will turn travel into continuously optimised systems, only 3% of businesses surveyed said that travel is part of a fully orchestrated enterprise workflow.
