American Express Global Business Travel has announced the launch of Mobile Communications Management (MCM), a dynamic, visual traveller tracking and integrated two-way messaging solution.

This new capability can assist companies in promptly locating employee travellers and communicating to them on the spot to offer direct assistance in times of travel disruption.

MCM also offers the added benefit of continuously monitoring and mapping major travel disruptions such as weather systems, strikes or other events to help with contingency planning before events take place.

American Express Global Business Travel selected technology provider Charter Solutions to provide their patent-pending dynamic mapping functionality with our solution.

Companies that use MCM can create a roadmap view of the world and visually pinpoint traveller locations through colour-coded markers on a map as well as through a list view of traveller names by location.

The two-way communications feature then allows for custom messages and sending of pertinent information, such as location requests and status updates, to be sent to travellers mobile devices.

The dynamic mapping feature is integrated into the messaging tool enabling group situation management by clustering travellers based on their responses.

“Travel disruptions are an unavoidable part of business travel and it is important that companies and travellers are prepared with strategies and tools to effectively navigate these issues,” said Michel LaBianca, vice president of technology, American Express Global Business Travel.

“Our Mobile Communication Manager solution has been developed around our experience supporting clients through crisis situations.

“It is uniquely comprehensive, enterprise-wide and provides the location and two-way communication features that are absolutely necessary in managing travel holistically.”

Powered by American Express Global Business Travel’s patent-pending, travel data infrastructure, MCM receives key traveller trip information which populates the visual map and is continuously updated when itineraries are created, changed, or added.

Currently, when travel managers, company security officers or other teams need to locate their travellers the process can be a cumbersome effort stemming across multiple teams, sometimes located in different places around the world, to pull reports. 

The reports then require analysis, resulting in a significant amount of time passing between the original request and the achieved result leaving travel managers with a point-in-time view of their travellers’ locations. 

Intuitive, interactive and easy to use, MCM fits the natural actions of travel managers and eliminates the time consuming and potentially inaccurate task of pulling manual reports with its dynamic, visual map.