White-labeling business travel for the enterprise, without losing the person at the center
American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) is one of the world’s leading B2B travel management companies, holding an estimated 22% share of the global managed travel market and operating in 140+ countries. To put that in context: in 2017, when this project began, global business travel spending hit $1.33 trillion, its strongest growth year since the post-recession recovery. GBT was a major force in that market, and the enterprises they served expected infrastructure to match.
If you’ve ever booked a flight, hotel, or rental car for a business trip through your employer, there’s a good chance GBT was running the backend.
In 2017, AmEx GBT partnered with Rokkan to design Explore, a new white-label portal for corporate clients. What resulted is a platform that enterprise businesses and their traveling employees could use to manage, track, and act on all business travel activity within their organizations.
Role
Experience Design Director
Focus
UX, Product design
Duration
8-week redesign + 3 month optimization period
The Challenge
One platform, many masters
Enterprise travel management sounds straightforward until you start mapping the actual users. GBT serves businesses, not individuals, which means Explore had to work for a client’s travel administrator, their employees on the road, and executive assistants booking on someone else’s behalf, all from within the same product.
Making it harder: not all GBT clients subscribe to the same services. The platform needed to flex around each client’s specific product footprint without breaking down or feeling incomplete. A modular architecture wasn’t optional, it was the only viable path.
Three core user roles defined the first launch:
Travelers
needed to book (flights, hotels, car rentals, conference rooms), review company policies (per diems, spending limits), and manage their own profiles and upcoming trips.
Managers
needed everything travelers had, plus the ability to analyze utilization and spending trends and approve traveler bookings in a timely manner.
Arrangers
(think: executive assistants) needed the ability to book on behalf of someone else entirely, a distinct workflow that couldn’t be bolted onto the Manager role without creating confusion.
What I Led
Architecture first, experience second
Information Architecture
Modular Dashboard via Portlets
Scoping Feature Decisions
Mobile-first Design Consideration
With Explore being a first-generation product, establishing the right foundation mattered more than chasing features. My focus was building an architecture simple enough to launch clearly and extensible enough to grow well past MVP.
We kept the primary navigation structure lean, anchored around functional areas rather than user roles. The system resolves role-appropriate content within those areas rather than splitting the experience into separate siloed paths. This kept the architecture honest as the product scales and new roles or capabilities get added.
The dashboard was built around portlets, modular cards users could arrange to suit their own workflows. This pattern was well-established for B2B dashboards of this era and gave the platform a practical customization layer without requiring significant engineering complexity.
The original brief opened the door to additional features, including an in-platform messaging center for colleague communication. We pushed back on that. Users already have messaging tools they rely on. Building a redundant one inside Explore would have added noise without adding value. Discipline around scope was as important as any design decision we made.
Travelers, by definition, are on the move. We prioritized mobile as a primary use case for key workflows, not an afterthought.
