Global Business Travel Group, Inc.

a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Jennifer Thorrington. Please go ahead.

Hello, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on sec.gov and our website at investors.amexglobalbusinesstravel.com. A slide presentation which accompanies today's prepared remarks is also available on the Amex GBT Investor Relations webpage. We would like to advise you that our comments contain certain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including industry and macroeconomic trends, cost savings, and acquisition synergies, among others. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these and other risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning and our other SEC filings. Throughout today's call, we will be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted operating expenses, free cash flow, and net debt. All references during today's call to such non-GAAP financial measures have been adjusted to exclude certain items. Definitions of these terms and the most directly comparable gap measures and reconciliations for non-gap measures are available in the supplemental materials of this presentation and in the earnings release. Participating with me today are Paul Abbott, our Chief Executive Officer, Karen Williams, our Chief Financial Officer, and David Thompson, our Chief Information Technology Officer. Also joining for the Q&A session today is Eric Bach, our Chief Legal Officer and Head of Global M&A. With that, I will now turn the call over to Paul. Paul?

Thank you, Jennifer. Welcome to everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter 2024 earnings call. In the second quarter, we delivered strong adjusted EBITDA growth, significant margin expansion, and accelerated free cash flow. These strong bottom line results were in line with our expectations and put us on track to deliver against our full year guidance. Our focus on controlling costs and driving operating leverage is clearly evidenced in our Q2 results. Adjusted operating expenses increased just 2% compared to 6% revenue growth. And we drove significant adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of 240 basis points year over year and adjusted EBITDA growth of 20%. Our progress to positive and accelerating free cash flow remains an important focus for the company, providing us with additional opportunities to invest in our growth and drive shareholder returns. And a strong second quarter gives us the confidence to raise our free cash flow guidance for the full year. Last quarter, we mentioned an opportunity to refinance our debt, which we have now successfully completed in July. We've significantly lowered our interest costs, extended our debt maturities, and upsized our revolver, and we continue to deleverage our balance sheet. Increased demand for our software and services resulted in continued share gains on a strong foundation. We have sustained our pace of new wins and, importantly, further increased our customer retention rate. Starting with revenue growth, revenue was up 6% to reach 625 million for the quarter, driven by growth in transactions, TTV, and increased demand for our products and professional services. Transactions were up 4%. We saw a slowdown in the second quarter, driven primarily by slower same-store sales and the impact of the Olympics in France. We expect France will bounce back in the fall. Excluding France, transactions were up 5% in the quarter. TTV grew just ahead of transactions by 5%, driven primarily from the transaction growth, as well as higher average ticket prices and higher average hotel room rates. Again, excluding France, TTV grew by 6% in the quarter. Finally, here, our focus on margin expansion and operating leverage resulted in adjusted EBITDA growth of 20%, to 127 million with strong margin expansion of 240 basis points. In the second quarter, we continue to see stronger relative performance with our global multinational customers. As a reminder, we divide our customer base into two general categories, global multinational or GMN and small and medium enterprises or SME. We generally use annual TTV to divide customers into these categories, although this measure can vary by country and by customer need. We do not have products or services that are offered solely to one size of customer. We tend to find that customers of all sizes may prefer different solutions. Some larger customers may prefer a simpler approach, while some smaller customers may prefer a more James Gunnery, bespoke high touch global solution back to the quarter global multinational transactions were up 7% with double digit growth in the financial services and pharma industries. James Gunnery, We saw very solid growth across our top five industry verticals which account for over 60% of our total global multinational transactions. It is important to point out that we did see global multinational same-store sales growth returning to more normalized levels as we cycle over the technology ramp up we saw in 2023. We have built the most valuable B2B marketplace in travel with the most comprehensive and the most competitive content in the industry. Our strong combination of technology and people delivering the best experiences proven at scale continues to resonate with customers. Our very high customer retention rate with Global Multinational, which reached 98% over the last 12 months, demonstrates the value that we bring to this important customer segment. GMN TTV growth in the quarter was also strong, up 9% driven by the transaction growth and a two percentage point benefit from higher average ticket prices. Most recent customer survey is encouraging as we look out over the balance of the year. It shows that our top 100 GMN customers now expect travel spend to be up approximately 10% year over year for the full year 2024. And this is an increase of two percentage points versus the previous survey in Q1. Driven by improvements in expectations within professional services, mining, and the oil and gas industries. stronger performance within GMN customers highlights the strength of our diversified model as SME growth was relatively muted in the quarter. On a transaction basis, GMN growth was 7% versus SME at 1%. As we described last quarter, SME customers have tightened spending controls in the face of sustained higher interest costs and higher inflation. As we also discussed on the call in Q1, This is a broader trend for SME businesses beyond travel spend, given the more challenging macro environment. We are confident that as the macro economic conditions improve, so will SME growth. And this outlook is supported by our most recent customer survey, which showed 82% of our top 120 SME customers expect travel spend to grow or remain flat in the second half of this year. Meanwhile, our new wins performance in SME continues to be strong. As you've heard from our peers in the travel industry, we are seeing a negative impact on business travel in France related to the Olympics. Transactions in France were very strong in the first quarter, but rapidly decelerated and ended the second quarter down 4%. France is actually our second largest country by transaction volume. It resulted in a negative impact of one percentage point to year over year total transaction and TTV growth in Q2. The impact to our revenue growth is smaller. Clearly, we believe this is a temporary impact and we expect to see a return to growth in France from September onwards. Finally here, growth in our air transactions versus hotel and domestic versus international was consistent in the second quarter. So turning to the commercial highlights, we continue to gain share with total new wins value of 3.3 billion over the last 12 months. Importantly, the share gains are on an even stronger foundation of increasingly impressive customer retention, which is up to 97% at the enterprise level over the last 12 months. Our biggest growth opportunity remains with SME customers, which represents approximately 950 billion of travel spend. We are already a leader in managed travel in this segment. But 70% of this opportunity is not currently in a managed travel program. As our new wins progress demonstrates, more and more SME customers are recognizing the value of our software and our services and our professionally managed travel program. As a result, SME new wins over the last 12 months totaled $2 billion. In the second quarter, 79% of our transactions came through digital channels. Over 60% of those digital bookings came through on our own software platforms, NEO and Agencia, which we continue to believe is an area of significant competitive differentiation for us. The collaboration between American Express and our Amex GBT NEO One spend management platform is progressing well with pleasing results from Amex GBT's most recent digital marketing lead campaign targeting the very large opportunity in the SME segment. Amex GBT's NEO1 customers acquired digitally is on track to grow 2x year over year in 2024. We continue to invest in NDC and our marketplace to make sure we offer the most comprehensive, the most competitive content in the industry, and to help our partners retail to our premium customers in the most effective way, We're now working with 20 airlines on NDC. And because we own our software solutions in NEO and Agencia, we are very well positioned to lead the changes that are required. We also continue to make business travel more sustainable. Our new agreement with Shell Aviation reinforces our commitment to sustainable aviation fuel. Avelia is one of the world's first blockchain powered book and claim platforms for SAF. And we already have more than 30 corporations and airlines participating in the Avelia program, including customers like Bank of America and Google. Also during the second quarter, we published our annual ESG report that highlighted our commitment and our progress in sustainability, governance, and developing the workforce of the future. We continue to successfully work with non-governmental organizations to provide safe travel for vulnerable refugees and get rapid response emergency relief workers to disaster zones. Our inclusion groups continue to thrive. We are growing the number of minority-owned businesses in our supplier portfolio, and we are working with customers to make business travel more accessible for all. I also want to take a moment to thank my colleagues for the clear thinking and swift action that helped mitigate the impact of the recent CrowdStrike incident. We have received countless notes from customers thanking our service team for their outstanding support, helping travelers through the disruption to get where they needed to be. And finally, as you saw last week, we provided an update on the CWT acquisition, which is now expected to close in the first quarter of 2025. We continue to work collaboratively with the CMA, which intends to continue its review of the transaction and a phase two investigation. As well as with the Department of Justice in the US, we believe that a comprehensive analysis will clearly show the transaction will create more choice for customers, more efficient distribution for suppliers, while maintaining a highly competitive environment for business travel services. We continue to expect to receive full approval of the transaction. Before turning the call over to Karen to discuss our results and outlook in more detail, I'm very pleased to introduce David Thompson, our CIO. We have previously discussed the potential of the investments that we're making in automation and AI to drive further productivity gains and margin expansion. And I'm pleased to say we are making good progress as initiatives now move from the pilot phase to implementation. And as I promised on a previous earnings call, David is here to speak more about our progress with RPA, machine learning, and AI to create better experiences for our customers and to improve productivity. David, over to you.