CWT Alternatives: Where to Move After the Amex GBT Deal

If your company is on a CWT contract, nothing has broken and there is no deadline forcing you to move. CWT is now part of American Express Global Business Travel, which completed the acquisition on September 2, 2025, and existing contracts continue under their existing terms. What has changed is who sits across the table at renewal, and whether the alternatives you were planning to benchmark against are still independent of the company you are renewing with. For a lot of programs, the answer is no.

This is a practical guide to that decision: when staying is the right call, when it is not, and which platforms are genuinely different rather than differently branded. Every price below was read at the vendor's own source in August 2026 and is attributed where it sits.

The shortlist problem nobody mentions

Amex GBT owns Egencia, which it acquired from Expedia, and now owns CWT. That matters the moment you write an RFP list, because the three names a mid-market or enterprise buyer most often starts with are Amex GBT, Egencia and CWT. Put all three on a list and you have run a competitive process against one company with three brands.

None of that makes them bad products. Egencia in particular is a capable online booking tool with a long track record. But pricing tension in a negotiation comes from a credible willingness to leave, and you cannot generate it against three business units of the same parent. If you take one thing from this page, make it this: at least one name on your shortlist has to sit outside that group, and ideally two.

When staying with CWT is the right decision

Switching a corporate travel program is expensive in a way that does not show up on the invoice. You re-implement, re-train travelers, rebuild approval workflows, re-load negotiated rates and lose institutional knowledge in the account team. For plenty of programs that cost exceeds anything a new vendor saves, and the honest advice is to stay and renegotiate.

Stay if your program is genuinely global and agent-heavy, if you have significant negotiated air and hotel content loaded, if a large share of your travel is complex multi-leg international routing, or if duty of care coverage across many countries is a board-level requirement. Those are the things the large agencies are actually good at and where the newer platforms are still thin. Stay also if you are mid-contract with a subscription fee that was priced against a travel forecast you have since exceeded, because in that specific case the subscription is quietly working in your favour.

Move if your program is US-domestic and mostly online, if agent-assisted bookings are a small minority, if you are paying a management fee for a service model you do not use, or if you cannot get a straight answer about what your fees will be after the integration. The single strongest signal is your online adoption rate. Above roughly 80 percent online booking, you are paying a full-service agency for something you are barely using.

The alternatives, by what they actually charge

The useful way to sort this category is by revenue model rather than by feature list, because the revenue model predicts almost everything else about how a vendor behaves.

Two of these deserve a specific note for anyone coming off CWT. BCD Travel is the obvious like-for-like: it is the remaining large independent global TMC, it sells the same service model, and it publishes more about its fee vocabulary than any of its peers, which makes a quote easier to read. Our breakdown of the seven fee types is on the BCD Travel pricing page. And Navan is the obvious not-like-for-like: it replaces the agency model entirely rather than competing inside it, which is either the point or a dealbreaker depending on how much agent support your travelers actually consume.

How to price the alternatives against what you pay now

Convert everything to one number: dollars per booked trip, at your real forecast volume. It is the only way to compare a per transaction fee, a monthly subscription, a percentage of booking value and a free tier funded by commission, and the ranking changes surprisingly often once you do it.

Start from your own baseline. Pull twelve months of transaction fee lines off your CWT invoices and divide by trip count, then add the annual management fee and any per PNR booking tool charges, which are frequently on a separate line and frequently forgotten. Published TMC benchmarks put an online self-service booking near $7.84 and a phone booking near $25.20, so if your blended number is well above the low end, the question to ask is why so many bookings are touching an agent.

Then run the same arithmetic on each alternative at your volume. A percentage-based free tier is the one that catches people out: Perk Starter at 5 percent capped at $30 works out to roughly $30 a booking on any US trip over $600, which is $15,000 a year on 500 trips and more than most transaction fee structures. Free is a pricing model, not a discount. We work all of this through vendor by vendor on the corporate travel software pricing pillar, and per head on travel management software cost per employee.

Running the switch without losing the year

Give yourself two quarters, not two months. The work that actually takes time is not choosing the vendor, it is re-loading negotiated rates, rebuilding approval hierarchies, migrating traveler profiles including passport and loyalty data, and getting finance comfortable with a new invoice format.

Do the commercial groundwork before you talk to anyone. Write down your trip count by channel, your online adoption rate, your top twenty routes and your top twenty hotel properties, because every vendor will ask and the ones who quote without asking are guessing. Get your procurement paperwork in order at the same time, since a travel vendor change usually means reissuing the purchase orders that sit behind the contract, and that approval chain is often slower than the vendor selection itself. Our travel management RFP guide covers the process end to end.

Then insist on two answers in writing from every finalist, including your incumbent. What does a same-day change on an international itinerary cost, and who does it. And what happens when a traveler is stranded overnight in a city where your program has no negotiated hotel. Those two scenarios are where the real difference between a $0 platform and a full-service agency lives, and neither shows up in a feature matrix.

Questions buyers ask about leaving CWT

Is CWT still operating? Yes. CWT continues to serve clients as part of American Express Global Business Travel following the September 2, 2025 close. Existing contracts run under their existing terms, and CWT customers now also have access to Amex GBT software including Neo, Egencia and Select. What has gone is CWT's independent web presence: its solutions pages return 404 and its insights library redirects to the Amex GBT blog.

Do I have to move off CWT? No. There is no forced migration deadline in the public record, and we are not going to invent one. The decision point for most companies is their next renewal, which is when the commercial terms get rewritten against Amex GBT's structure rather than CWT's.

What is the closest alternative to CWT? BCD Travel, if you want the same full-service agency model from a company outside the Amex GBT group. It is the largest remaining independent global TMC, it prices the same way, and it publishes more about its fee structure than its peers. If you would rather leave the agency model behind entirely, Navan is the usual destination for US programs under 300 employees because its travel product is genuinely $0 at that size.

Will my fees go up after the acquisition? Unknown, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. What is public is that Amex GBT identified approximately $155 million of annual run-rate synergies within three years against a purchase price of approximately $540 million. That is a cost-removal thesis rather than a growth one, which is worth knowing when you plan a renewal, but it is not a prediction about your specific rate card.

The short version

CWT is now Amex GBT, and so is Egencia, which means a shortlist built from the obvious names may contain one vendor wearing three badges. Stay if your program is global, agent-heavy and rate-loaded; move if it is US-domestic and mostly self-service, because you are paying full-service prices for a service you are not using. Price every option as dollars per booked trip at your real volume, and treat percentage-based free tiers with the same scrutiny as a subscription, because at $30 a booking they are not cheap. The full fee history and the acquisition facts are on our CWT travel pricing page.

One part of this no booking platform solves: deciding where a trip goes and what happens on each day of it. If that is the piece you are trying to fix, the planner at the top of this page takes a destination, dates, a party size and a total budget and writes a priced day-by-day itinerary you can attach to an approval, then you book it through whichever channel your program mandates.