Amex GBT launches ‘Hotel Lobby’ to accelerate hotel sourcing with agentic AI
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The AI automates the data-intensive work, so teams can focus on strategy and negotiation to improve savings and program performance
American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), a software and services company for travel, expense, and meetings & events, announced the launch of Hotel Lobby, an agentic AI capability within its hotel sourcing consulting service. It is designed to shorten sourcing cycles and support continuous, year-round program optimisation.
Hotel Lobby uses specialised AI agents for coverage, negotiation, and sourcing that can help automate time-intensive tasks including data cleansing, wish rate calculation, and RFP validation. Unlike conversational AI copilots that simply respond to questions, the multi-agent system automates the sourcing workflow, freeing our team to focus on the moments where human judgment makes the real difference. It draws on negotiated rate benchmarks across thousands of global properties, supplier performance metrics from more than USD 5 billion in managed hotel spend, and compliance trends across Amex GBT’s client portfolio.
Amex GBT’s established hotel sourcing methodology delivers 28.8% average savings off the Best Available Rate and a 96% property response rate across more than 80,000 hotels sourced annually. Hotel Lobby runs that same process with AI automation and human judgment working side-by-side. While the AI agents do the heavy data lifting, experienced hotel-sourcing consultants retain responsibility for strategy, negotiations and exceptions.
“Hotel Lobby gives you the rigor of a full sourcing cycle and the speed to spend more time negotiating,” said Sara Andell, Director of Consulting Strategy, Amex GBT. “Our AI agents now handle the data work, compress sourcing cycles, and free our consultants to focus on what actually drives savings, backed by rich proprietary travel data and years of consulting experience.”
Hotel pricing, demand, and traveller behaviour shift constantly, yet many travel programs still run a single annual sourcing cycle. This creates coverage gaps, compliance drift, and missed savings between RFPs. Because Hotel Lobby takes care of the data prep and cuts the time it takes, teams can start the sourcing cycle with richer data available and complete it faster. It also lays the groundwork for continuous, year-round monitoring that protects negotiated value long after the RFP closes.
Hotel Lobby is built on the same principles of trusted data, governance, and transparency as Amex GBT’s broader agent-to-agent (A2A) architecture, which is already live across its travel servicing and booking products. It is the first in a series of AI-powered upgrades planned for Amex GBT Consulting in the coming months. Together, these capabilities are intended to support proactive, ongoing management of travel program spend. The company is also looking to integrate them further with its existing reporting and intelligence tools, giving clients a more connected view of their programs.
The wider opportunity for more coordinated travel management is reflected in independent research commissioned by Amex GBT and conducted by Forrester earlier this year. Only 3% of organisations surveyed described travel as part of a fully orchestrated enterprise workflow, while 92% of IT decision makers agreed that AI will transform travel into continuously optimised systems.
