Competition is heating up between the big banks to serve premium customers across travel, dining and experiences, with American Express looking to hire a leader that will help them build a new app ground-up.
Chase is nipping at the heels of American Express to become the third largest travel agency behind Expedia and Booking.com. Chase is working to integrate its points, online travel booking, lounge and dining/lifestyle into a broader ecosystem – but that project was supposed to be ‘done’ a year ago.
American Express has its own flag in dining, having acquired Resy. They’re ahead of Chase in airport lounge openings, and also own LoungeBuddy for global lounge advice to go along with not just their own lounges but all of their partner lounges as well. And they start off as a high volume travel agency and focused on premium customers.
American Express Centurion Lounge Charlotte
It appears that American Express has a new venture to bring all of these pieces together: a mobile app under development to offer travel planning, booking, and servicing and to highlight American Express benefits at each step of the journey – like access to lounges, booking restaurant reservations, and booking of experiences.
They are looking for a senior manager to drive the effort.
We are seeking a Senior Manager, Product Development to support the design, development and delivery of TLS’s first-ever travel & lifestyle booking and servicing mobile native booking experiences. We are hoping to not only enable native mobile travel and lifestyle shopping and booking journeys for our customers, but also serve as a true companion in all phases of the customer travel lifecycle, including trip inspiration and planning, post-booking servicing, and on-trip engagement and benefit reinforcement.
The incumbent will be a product manager and people leader, helping drive the team’s vision, advance the product roadmap, coordinate and manage internal and external development and engineering teams, and work with internal and external partners. The successful candidate will also support our effort to ensure any native experience is interoperable and synchronous with – and complementary to – other core AXP enterprise app journeys.
American Express Centurion Lounge Charlotte
A travel and lifestyle ‘super app’ is hard which is why Chase hasn’t really done it yet, despite acquiring online and offline travel agencies, launching dining partnerships and buying advice site The Infatuation, and building out airport lounges with Collinson Group.
American Express has similar pieces, and Capital One has been assembling theirs as well, as big card issuers seek a greater share of wallet spend from affluent consumers looking for experiences. I’m not confident that any of them will get it right, but the level of investment being made even in the disparate parts creates opportunities for consumers. Any time a big bank is spending heavily to promote a new effort, we can benefit.
(HT: A.P.)
Playing armchair CEO, I think the hardest things that Amex will come against is:
1. People don’t like having multiple apps from the same company
2. How do they get people to peel off of the main app to go through an adjacent, but not as day-to-day relevant, as the main app?
I could see this working if they integrate rewards into it. Separate banking & credit from rewards in the eyes of the customer. Build technology for access to the lounge (scan yourself in, as opposed to waiting for someone to swipe your card).
As a lifestyle app, I highly doubt it will get usage. As an app that connects in with the reward experience, I can definitely see how it works.
I think Bilt has a great model: The rewards and credit card functionality play second fiddle to the lifestyle and experience section which pops up as soon as you open the app. I never peruse the lifestyle and experience stuff with Amex, Chase, and, to a lesser degree, Capital One, but I find myself looking through stuff on Bilt all the time on my way to checking out my rewards and card information.
Hoping that Capital One and Chase do not follow American Epress’s road map. When AMEX raised the annual fee to $695 it was well above my comfort level for a premium card. Not because of the price, but because AMEX was moving into lifestyle in a big way. For us, it has always been a travel card. I don’t want or need discounts on expensive gym memberships where people stand around to impress each other. But I looked at it and decided that I could still come out ahead. At least for the first year after the increase. And then they dropped the bomb. Going forward I would have to pay to get a companion guest into their airport lounge. And that killed the deal. So I let go of AMEX. For now, the Capital One Venture X and the Chase Saphire Reserve are excellent cards for travel, and their lounges match or exceed AMEX lounges any day of the week.
An app is almost always going to be a subset of what’s on the Web. Why build an app when you can just put it on the Web and make it easier to find?
@ Gary — Maybe they shoud focus on making their travel agency not suck so bad. I consider them a non option for booking airline tickets. I have better things to do with my time than deal with their ridiculous ailine booking procedures.
Why would Amex want to remind people of their crowded, vulture infested lounges, and their abhorrent travel agency customer service? The more exposure you have to Amex the less premium they seem.
It feels like this app would effectively replace what Departures magazine was, and I can understand why they would prefer it be in app format.
It’s a good idea. When I travel I am always searching Infatuation, Eater, Yelp, etc for restaurants and such. An app that combines air and hotel booking, restaurant discovery and reservations, etc could actually be useful. The area where banks will fall short is in servicing travel reservations, actually making it seamless to get restaurant tables, etc. OTAs aren’t good at servicing reservations when things go sideways, and restaurants aren’t going to want to allocate too many of their tables to banks. It will take investment (customer service agents, money to restaurants and other experiences) for it to really wrk.
Jerry nailed it. Amex once again offering “premium exclusive experiences” for a card that more resembles a coupon book that everyone has now. Nothing is premium when everyone seems to have access (like centurion lounges)
Anything and everything in 2024 is data sales/profit driven. That’s the main goal of this app that is “designed to serve you”. You better bet all that data goes to the parent company, and is shared back to Amex. Good chance your “recommendations” on the app are just the typical old-school pay-to-play form of marketing/extortion via the businesses.
@Robert. True that. Hotel bookings yes, airline bookings no. Lousy service. Rules no one can understand when things go wrong.
@gene wondering how you view their booking experience as different compared to others… aren’t they all pretty much the same?