American Express Global Business Travel has agreed to be acquired by Long Lake Management in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.3 billion, the company announced on Monday (4 May).
The travel management company was rumoured in late November to be exploring a sale after failing to increase share prices last year.
The largest business travel agency in the world went public in May 2022 via special purpose acquisition company Apollo Strategic Growth Capital. The price of its shares, traded on the New York Stock Exchange as Global Business Travel Group (GBTG), continue to trade below its 52-week high by about 31 per cent.
Long Lake, backed by Alpha Wave and General Catalyst, laid out $9.50 per share, a 60 per cent premium over Friday's market close. Long Lake was founded in 2023 and invests in what it terms "frontier" technologies that "accelerate service industries."
The purchase – and its premium – show a significant vote of confidence in GBT's abilities to forge "the gold standard for customer excellence" with heavy investments in artificial intelligence to support "faster booking times, proactive disruption resolution, and frictionless travel administration," according to Long Lake CEO Alex Taubman.
American Express to sell stake, name stays with GBT
Alpha Wave has backed companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Cerebras Systems, TikTok and Aman Group. General Catalyst purports to give companies "access to insanely powerful advantages" and has supported brands including Airbnb, Anthropic, Hubspot, Kayak, Snap and Stripe.
General Catalyst's chairman and managing director is Ken Chenault, the former CEO of American Express, which spun off Amex GBT in 2014 in a 50/50 partnership with Certares, which paid $900 million to buy in and was largely dedicated to technology development at the time. Amex remained a 30 per cent stakeholder through GBT’s public incarnation on the NYSE.
American Express will sell all its stake in the company. GBT will retain the licensing agreement that allows the company to use the American Express name for "continuity for clients, partners and travellers worldwide," according to the company release.
CEO Paul Abbott will continue to lead Amex GBT. He called out in a statement the success of the sale for shareholders and for customers. "This partnership with Long Lake is about serving [customers] even better," Abbott said.
"General Catalyst and Alpha Wave, among Long Lake's world-class investors, have backed some of the most successful technology companies in the world. Together with Long Lake's applied AI capabilities and our travel expertise, global scale and trusted customer and supplier relationships built over decades, Amex GBT is driving the transformation of business travel."
Chenault in a statement focused on what each entity brought to the table: "American Express Global Business Travel was built on trust earned over decades. Similarly, the foundation of the Long Lake model is a strong commitment to extraordinary customer service for the modern era."
Tech-driven GBT hard sell for public investors?
Recent headlines for Amex GBT included its protracted acquisition of rival business travel agency CWT, concluded on 2 September, as a $540 million transaction after nearly 18 months of regulatory investigations in the UK and US. Just weeks later, GBT announced a blockbuster partnership with SAP Concur in which the two companies hitched their technology and innovation wagons together with a joined vision – and a shared resources team – to create a new travel services and booking tool collaboration called Complete, available only to shared Amex GBT and SAP Concur customers.
This was ostensibly to create a technology partnership and innovation environment in which both providers could "run faster," they said in an interview with BTN, with travel content integrations and artificial intelligence developments.
Neither the CWT merger nor the Concur technology partnership created a sustained lift in GBT's share price, though the US Department of Justice's decision in late July to drop its antitrust case over the CWT deal juiced the stock for a few months back to levels seen on day-one trading in 2022. Headwinds since then, including economic uncertainties and the exposure of international travel to geopolitical risk, have weighed down trading values for GBT.
In mid-February, when the stock was trading near its 52-week low, the company issued a financial statement that included unaudited Q4 and full-year results and disclosed that the board of directors had doubled the capacity of the company's share repurchase programme to $600 million. Such moves often indicate a company believes its shares are undervalued and telegraphs confidence that current strategies will bolster that value.
Questions about legacy technology platforms continued to dog GBT's share price, as did questions around whether GBT had too much on its plate with an intensive CWT integration process plus its new partnership with Complete, not to mention Egencia and Neo also in the mix.
There's a narrative that more tech-forward players – including Navan, which was long expected to go public and did so in October 2025 – might outflank legacy players like GBT. Navan's brief time on the NYSE has been volatile, with share prices as low as $8.11 and as high as $22.75.
That said, on GBT's latest earnings call in March, the company claimed AI was helping to drive more margin with outright automation and agent productivity enhancements, and new client-facing enhancements have just been launched, including a natural-language interface for the Egencia booking tool.
There also was evidence, however, that it has become costlier for the company to maintain and grow market share. Its latest earnings report showed a more than 10 per cent year-over-year increase in sales and marketing spend, from $400 million to $442 million, which could compromise margins. This may have been most evident in its efforts to capture small and midsize clients, the results of which executives noted in 2025 had become more muted.
A strong AI narrative – and faster developments supported by heavyweight AI investors – could turn any customer acquisition challenges around.
Amex GBT used its proxy earnings statement before going private to exhibit its sheer size and force in the market, including its ability to retain and win clients.
The company reported first-quarter revenue was up 35 per cent over the same period in 2025, including its CWT-driven business.
New client wins represented $3.4 billion in Q1, including BTN Corporate Travel 100 account Pfizer and $2 billion in a record single quarter for new SME accounts. Client retention since the CWT acquisition in September was 96 per cent, according to the company.
"Our financial performance and continued commercial progress in Q1 was strong," said Abbott in a press release. "Our next-gen Egencia, powered by Agentic AI, and strategic alliance with SAP Concur on Complete are reshaping how enterprises manage travel and expense globally.
“Total new wins value of $3.4 billion and 96 per cent customer retention demonstrate the strength of our offerings and customer relationships."