American Express Unveils eXplore

American Express Business Travel (AEBT), has unveiled eXplore, a new web portal that promotes greater efficiency and cost savings by empowering travelers with anytime, anywhere access to needed resources. Cost savings are expected from increase usage of online booking technology and improved traveler compliance to policies.

“eXplore is the latest in a series of innovations from American Express aimed at reinventing the way business travelers purchase travel and related services, and access information relevant to their needs and preferences,” said Lisa Durocher, senior vice president, global marketing, American Express Business Travel. “In the months to come, eXplore will integrate our next generation Profile technology, driving greater flexibility in the profiling of content to include traveler preferences and corporate hierarchy and paving the way for future capabilities such as dining and entertainment recommendations, social networking and collaboration tools, mobile device access and more.”

The eXplore portal delivers information, applications and processes gathered from external and internal websites on an interface that is customizable to provide a unique experience for each user. The solution uses a series of portlets, or individual windows to integrate custom-driven content from different sources onto one landing page. Through the portlets, eXplore users can book travel, receive news and alerts from American Express or their company, view destination information, access itineraries and invoices, as well as employ relevant travel tools such as a currency converter.

Content available through eXplore is also personalized for users based on their language, country, region and role. For example, travel or procurement managers will be provided with unique access to travel expense management tools such as AXIS @ work through a custom portlet. Individual preferences such as news feeds, weather in select cities and links to favorite websites are also customizable. Future integration is expected with other American Express products such as charge card and international payments services.

“eXplore helps corporations maximize savings by increasing online travel booking adoption rates, driving efficiencies through faster access to content and increasing compliance to policy through targeted reinforcing communication,” Durocher said.

eXplore is currently being deployed across the American Express Business Travel customer base in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and France with plans for rolling it out in other markets across Europe, Mexico, and South America later this year and next.

Visit www.americanexpress.com/businesstravel.