Change one airline and you change its passengers' experience; change the platform on which companies manage travel and you change everyone's. That leverage sits behind
American Express Global Business Travel's Finalist place for the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award at the
2024 Travelling for Business Awards.
Amex GBT is the world's leading
business-to-business travel platform, supplying software and services for travel, expenses and meetings to organisations of every size across more than 140 countries. The award recognises dedication to DE&I within a company's own organisation, and judges found a global workforce managed with inclusion as an explicit discipline, employee networks resourced as agents of change, leadership accountability attached to representation, and a culture programme spanning the dozens of countries where its people work.
The distinctive contribution, though, is what the company does with its position. Amex GBT convenes the industry around inclusive travel, gathering clients, suppliers and researchers to examine how identical itineraries land differently across a diverse workforce, and publishes research that pushes duty-of-care thinking beyond its traditional defaults, from accessibility to the safety calculus that varies by identity and destination. Its major traveller studies, conducted with independent pollsters across thousands of business travellers, have given corporate clients hard evidence about the differing needs and expectations of a changing travelling population, evidence that quietly reshapes policies at companies far larger than any single airline's passenger base.
In a two-strong 2024 shortlist, the title went to Virgin Atlantic, whose employee-facing firsts made an irresistible case, but Amex GBT's presence confirmed that inclusion in travel is now being driven from the buying side as forcefully as from the supplying side.
The company's inclusion work also travels through its supply chain and events. Supplier diversity commitments pull underrepresented businesses into one of travel's largest procurement flows, and the company's marquee industry gatherings platform voices the sector traditionally seated at the back, normalising representation where deals and standards are actually set. Influence of this kind compounds invisibly, policy by policy, contract by contract, across the whole managed-travel economy.
The
Travelling for Business Awards use this category to spotlight where the industry's culture is actually made, and American Express Global Business Travel's 2024 recognition pointed at an underrated answer: the travel manager's platform, and the company determined to build inclusion into it.
