Patrick Andersen was appointed chief executive officer of CWT in May 2022. He was previously chief commercial officer at the TMC and has has held international leadership roles at CWT for more than 15 years
Patrick Andersen is president and CEO of CWT, the world’s third-largest travel management company, which is due to be acquired by the world’s largest – American Express Global Business Travel. BTN Europe spoke with Andersen at the GBTA Convention in Atlanta in July, shortly before the UK’s regulatory body, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), announced it was moving its investigation of the deal into an in-depth second phase after identifying a number of concerns. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
BTN Europe: How’s the merger progressing? What action can CWT take at this point in time?
Patrick Andersen: It is business as usual. It’s going through the regulatory approval process and we hope we’ll have that done by the year end but until that point it’s business as usual [Editor's note: Following the CMA's escalation of its inquiry, Amex GBT has now stated it expects to complete the acquisition of CWT in Q1 of 2025]. We’re diligently engaged in that regulatory approval process. We’re doing a bit of planning, but no more. There’s not much we can do pre-approval so we’re respectful of that.
BTN Europe: What does that preparation look like?
Andersen: We can do some planning and look at what the transition might look like. But that is very restricted and we’re diligently following the guidelines. There’s nothing we can actively do and there’s nothing we can implement. What we can do is plan for the transition: what does it look like on day one? What does it look like past that date? It’s a little bit difficult to sit on your hands but that’s what you’ve got to do. They [Amex GBT] have been there before with [the acquisition of] Ovation, Egencia, HRG.
BTN Europe: What’s customer sentiment like at CWT regarding the merger?
Andersen: They’re looking forward to seeing what it entails for them, but I have to say it’s generally neutral to positive. I haven’t had any negative sentiment. I think customers are anticipative as to what it might offer them.
BTN Europe: Some customers will have chosen CWT over Amex in the past – or moved from one to the other – for good reason. How does that play out in that situation?
Andersen: There will always be that possibility when companies get together. And maybe they will step back and say 'well, the companies together are a new entity now' and reassess… maybe what they've experienced before isn’t the story of the future.
BTN Europe: What happens to investment and innovation at CWT at this particular point in time?
Andersen: We have to assume business as usual so you will see us continue to go to market with new innovations. Our recent special assistance service, for example. We’ve also been working on price optimisation and adding messaging channels to evolve our myCWT platform. Time doesn’t stand still.
BTN Europe: Can you comment on what might happen to your relationship with Spotnana when the deal goes through?
Andersen: That relationship has gone very well. To your point, I won’t speculate on that. We have a good relationship with Spotnana, we’ve enjoyed success together. We’ve got a number of customers deployed on the platform and we’re geographically expanding that capability. We’re in a good place and it has proved successful for us.
BTN Europe: Where is growth coming from for CWT at the moment? Amex GBT talks a lot about winning SME or unmanaged business.
Andersen:
Actually, the corporate sector has done fairly well this year. There
has always been natural growth – it follows GDP to a large degree. That
was certainly true pre-pandemic; I don’t know that we’ve got back to
that level of correlation yet.
BTN Europe: GBTA's new report put spending on business travel at a record high but inflation is driving that. Do you see the same at CWT? And what about transaction volumes – are they back to 2019 levels?
Andersen: Inflation absolutely has a place in what
we’re seeing in our total transaction value but there is also growth in
transactions. They're back to pre-pandemic levels in some segments and
in some geographies, but I would say at a macro level, no, they're not.
BTN Europe: What do your clients want right now in terms of additional services and new capabilities or technology?
Andersen: These themes are pretty consistent: clients want a good booking experience across all channels and a consistent one. They also want access to content and that is something we continue to strive for and invest in – both on the hotel side and on air. And we need to be able to respond to unexpected disruption. You have to be there supporting travellers so that notion of aftersales support… the service that a TMC provides there just continues to echo. So it's consistency of experience across all channels, that those channels continue to evolve, it's inventory, and it's aftersales service.
BTN Europe: On the subject of disruption, how were the days after the CrowdStrike outage for you?
Andersen: I think all of us [TMCs] have been strained by the volume of travellers experiencing the disruption they have. There’s no way you can plan for that level of demand, so we’ve all been under pressure. I think some airlines were not exposed to the same level that Delta was and I don’t envy Glen [Hauenstein, Delta Air Lines president] having to get up on stage this morning [at the GBTA Convention]. I find it astonishing that a bug like that can get in the system and that it has the impact it had. It’s a bit of a wake up call.
BTN Europe: These kind of incidents help showcase what a TMC is there for...
Andersen: I think so. Our place in the value chain is secure and I think that is continuously demonstrated. We absolutely provide the necessary experience upfront for the shopping, then there’s everything we do around security and safety, plus what we’re now doing with DEI and special assistance services – which is pretty novel actually because it’s a very fragmented reality. Every country and every location has a different modus operandi to engage with people so we’re building a seamless experience with one point of access. That shows value.
BTN Europe: How are you leveraging AI right now, both internally and customer-facing?
Andersen: AI gets a lot of voice now but AI and machine learning are things we’ve worked with for a long time. I think generative AI has increased the noise in conversations like this. We’ve been using machine learning to automate things going back some time. But as to where it comes into play today, as regards the traveller, AI has a place in curating the inventory that’s presented. It can be leveraged to really make sure we can utilise past buying behaviour, travel preferences and travel programmes to present the best inventory. And that’s something we’ve done for some time through our hotel booking channel.
Also, we think about chat as a channel and where AI is now able to really engage in an unstructured conversation and make it structured. Sure, an agent may have to take over at some point but you can get quite far down the interaction with a traveller [using AI] to make the ultimate conversation with the agent very brief. We are using that at the moment. There are also obviously processes we can automate internally and, ultimately, it’s going to improve our efficiency.
BTN Europe: How about a conversational style booking tool – is that coming?
Andersen: I think it is. We actually had a speaking virtual assistant way back when [Carla] which was a little bit ahead of its time. But I cannot see why that’s not possible, or why AI can’t control your schedule to say ‘you have this meeting in Spain, here are some itineraries for you’. AI is going to bring more proactiveness. If you look at the most recent price optimisation tool we’ve implemented, it uses AI to further hone this notion of when is the price right to either rebook or make a booking. It’s coming into play.