American Express Planning To Build New Travel And Lifestyle Super App
American Express Planning To Build New Travel And Lifestyle Super App
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.)
