American Express Business Travel Launches Quick Exchange to Automate Re-Ticketing Across U.S. Reservation Network

Powered by Worldspan Rapid Reprice® technology, new solution speeds airline ticket repricing, reissues and refunds when business travelers’ itineraries change

NEW YORK, NY,- American Express Business Travel, a global industry leader in business travel management, today launched Quick Exchange, powered by Worldspan’s Rapid Reprice® technology, to fully automate its ticket repricing, reissuing and refunding processes across the Company’s U.S. corporate travel reservation network and for all the global distribution system (GDS) booking platforms used by its travel counselors.

Quick Exchange automates the processes for airline ticket repricing, exchanges and refunds when a traveler’s itinerary changes, returning a new ticket with the applicable fares, taxes, penalties, or administrative fees together with additional collections or returns. By eliminating manual reticketing efforts, Quick Exchange helps to improve travel counselor productivity, servicing speed and quality. Quick Exchange also integrates with American Express’ centralized ticket database to improve tracking of unused and refundable tickets; helping American Express clients to strengthen their corporate controls and maximize their air travel supplier relationships.

American Express will integrate Quick Exchange into its TravelBahn distribution solution set to further augment the Company’s mechanisms for managing travel supplier content globally.

"With Worldspan and its Rapid Reprice® technology underpinning our new Quick Exchange solution, American Express becomes the first global travel management company to implement automated ticket re-pricing and refunding in the U.S. across all its GDS booking platforms" said Julie Bottner, Senior Vice President of Business Travel North America, Service Delivery Network. "We hope and expect that the American Express Quick Exchange solution will speed up client servicing, allowing our travel counselors to manage more reservations, more effectively. And, perhaps most importantly, help our clients to recapture or avoid the potential for dollars lost when unused tickets expire and refunds go unreturned"

"By engaging Worldspan to power its ticket repricing and reissuing automation efforts, and implementing Rapid Reprice technology across its U.S. reservation system and multi-GDS environment, American Express Business Travel sends the strongest endorsement yet for how IT automation can help reduce travel servicing costs, increase employee productivity and enhance the client experience" said Andrew Cuomo, Worldspan Vice President of Account Management.

Worldspan has invested over 460,000 man-hours in Rapid Reprice technologies since 1996, which have earned 10 industry distinctions. Nearly 70,000 Rapid Reprice transactions are performed daily by existing customers.