Sophia Lundberg's speech

at our Toronto Congress 2011

Good Afternoon.

It is my sincere pleasure to be here with you today. From my earliest days in this role, it was clear that Les Clefs d’Or is an important partner to American Express and a key element in the way we take care of our most premium customers. So I was very happy when the organizing committee asked me to join you today.  This gives me a great opportunity to thank you personally for your support to our customers every day and share my thoughts on how we can continue to support each other in the years to come.

Let me start by thanking our host, Toni Daoud, President of Les Clefs d’Or Canada and Chairman of the Organizing Committee, as well as the entire Organizing Committee, who have clearly created a wonderful Congress. I also want to thank Aldo Giacomello for inviting me to join you here this week and for his unwavering commitment to our relationship. Aldo has been a great ally and collaborator with American Express over the past many years, as we work to build and enhance the relationship between our two organizations. And, of course, I want to thank the International President of Les Clefs d’Or, Robert Watson, for his support, which has helped to make the relationship between American Express and Les Clefs d’Or so successful. And I want to congratulate and thank your incoming President, Virginia Casale who I am really looking forward to working with in the coming years.

The relationship between American Express and Les Clefs d’Or is very special and quite unique for our company.I have been impressed from the very start by the great symbioses and synergy between our two organizations. My predecessor, Daniela Cerboni, has done an excellent job of fostering this relationship from our side and I hope to continue the same, deepening the ties around the world and finding even more ways to mutually benefit from working together.

Today I want to share a little with you about my team, the Membership Travel Services organization, share some insights about the International premium travelers that we serve, and talk about how we can work together to optimize our partnership to serve those customers and grow our respective businesses. Membership Travel Services (or MTS) is the international consumer travel division of American Express. We are dedicated to providing travel and lifestyle support to our Centurion and Platinum Cardholders from around the world, outside of the US.

As Gerry mentioned when he introduced me this morning, I have been with American Express for over 20 years, and joined the Luxury Travel business about 5 months ago. I’ve travelled to 16 countries in the past 5 months, visiting my teams around the world and met many of the 2,000 employees that take care of our international premium Cardmembers. I have witnessed while my team has risen to the occasion again and again over the past few months to support our customers in crisis through the flooding in Brisbane, the Earthquake in Christchurch and the ongoing crisis in Japan, as well as a hundred other everyday situations. I am truly amazed by the stories that I have heard.

In our business, we like to say that “Extraordinary Service is a Story Worth Telling. We make a habit of collecting our best customer service stories and sharing them with our staff to help illustrate the point of what extraordinary service looks like, and to elevate our service delivery overall. And the stories are truly incredible. Every one of these images represents one of our extraordinary stories: Elvis weddings, impossible to find gifts, even a horticulturalist to look after a bonsai tree while our customer was on holiday. We’ve organized private concerts, personalized design services and, with the help of some of you in this room, even private tours of world class museums like the Louvre in Paris.

It is the challenge to deliver that level of service every day, on every customer interaction, that is my mission, and where I think that we can work together to build our business with our mutual customers. We know that delivering a premium level of service is the key to securing the loyalty and advocacy of our premium customer group.  Our goal is to turn our Cardmembers into life-long advocates of American Express. To give you a sense of the scope of our business, I can tell you that:

• Today, we operate 24 International Customer Service Centres outside of the US, providing travel and lifestyle service to Centurion and Platinum Cardmembers in over 25 countries. We also maintain Retail Travel Office Locations in Italy, Mexico + Argentina.
• Our team handles 3 Million incoming calls annually, plus 100,000 inbound E-mail and SMS messages last year.
• And we have over 500,000 Lifestyle Requests each year, with a 92% fulfillment rate.
• Our largest ever single booking was a $1.6 million honeymoon last year  - -  which included Private jets + Private cars, custom daily itineraries, fine dining and some of the very best hotels in the world:  Balmoral, Four Seasons George V, Burj al Arab and One & Only Maldives.
• For our customers, who can pay for holidays using their Membership Reward points, 4 and 5 million point bookings are not out of the ordinary.

While we don’t disclose our numbers of Centurion or Platinum Cardmembers, I can tell you that these are the most premium Cardmembers in our portfolio.We conduct a bi-annual survey of our Cardmembers along with the publishers at the Departures and Centurion Magazines to learn a little more about our Cardmembers.  What our Centurion Cardmembers tell us is that:

• They typically spend about 20 times more than our basic Green cardholders per year.
• These customers account for about 80% of our travel and lifestyle bookings.
• They typically report a Household Income of over $950,000 US Dollars and a Net Worth of over $8 million US Dollars.
• On average, they own on average 5 – 8 properties.
• And over 90% of our customers say that they plan to stay in a five star hotel in the coming year, and over 50% plan to fly first class.
• Platinum Cardmember report numbers at about 1/3 of these statistics.

As we develop our own business construct to support our Cardmembers, we strive to provide “Privilege and Access” to our Platinum Cardmembers, who want us to CURATE experiences for them.  For Centurion Cardmembers, our service is more personalized, more about CREATING custom experiences and delivering what we think of as “effortless travel and lifestyle” support for this customer group.
At American Express, we have an implicit mission:  To help these people lead extraordinary lives.  Like all of you, we need to personally engage with our customers, connect with them emotionally, in order to achieve that mission.  All of us work for strong brands, and when customers walk through your front door, or become Cardmembers, they do so with a certain set of expectations about what our brand stands for.  Those expectations become a sort of promise to our customers.  It is our ability to fulfill that promise that will ensure the engagement and loyalty of our customers now and in the future. Loyalty earned through delivering on our promises, and by making our customers feel connected, special, and cared for.
That is where our affinity for Les Clefs d’Or comes in.  In fact, we work directly with Les Clefs d’Or colleagues all over the world today in a number of ways to deepen the ties between our two organizations, which has become an important part of the way American Express is able to achieve the extraordinary for our Cardmembers.  Most importantly, your hotels and our travel service depend on each other to achieve our goals.  We drive each other’s success and we need to work together today, more than ever, to create opportunities for innovation and growth. 
For Les Clefs d’Or this means creating ways to deepen our customer and guest relationships to increase the numbers who use your service, driving loyalty among your guests. As you may know, within my own organization, we have several Les Clefs d’Or members, and they are highly valued assets!  Many of them are here with us today.  I want to point out my colleagues Gerry Parent from Canada, Mary Steadman (formerly of Canada) and now working for us in the UK, Eugene Bagdasarov from Moscow, and Marco Milanez from Mexico who could not be with us today but is certainly here in spirit. I very much appreciate the pride and passion that they bring to their profession and to this organization.  It is truly inspiring.
I have to say that in the past year, American Express and Les Clefs d’Or have continued to make good progress, working together to help both of our organizations be more successful and to enhance the experiences of our mutual customers.  I am always impressed by the ways in which my team at American Express will work with your members to create memorable experiences for our clients, and your guests.
Beyond the day to day support that Les Clefs d’Or provides to our team, we have also developed a highly successful and mutually beneficial training programme between our two organizations. Originally piloted in Switzerland at the Beau Rivage Hotels under the excellent support of Aldo Giacomello, this programme allows our concierge staff to spend some time behind the concierge desk, experience face to face customer relations first hand, becoming better trained as concierge themselves, learning to work more effectively with our Les Clefs d’Or colleagues, and becoming experts on the host hotel and the destination.
We have replicated this model in several different markets, and have found tremendous benefit to both the “trainer” and the “trainee” as we send our top concierge and travel staff to spend a day in the shoes of a hotel concierge.  Our employees tell us that the time has been a highly valued investment in their own customer service skills, helping them to understand the relationships among American Express, our customers, and our hotel partners better than ever before.  Among many others, including many of you in this room, our team is working directly with Aldo Giacomello at the Beau Rivage in Geneva, Frank Laino at the Langham in London, and Edward Ma at the Langham in Hong Kong, as well as Fred Lui at the Royal Garden Hotel in Hong Kong, and, of course, Roger Bastioni at the Majestic Barriere in Cannes.  Plus, I want to point out that we have developed a terrific relationship with Holly Steil, who is a critical part of our own Concierge training programme.  Holly has travelled the world to meet with and speak to our staff, helping them to understand and develop their own customer service magic.
I am truly impressed by the tremendous progress that we have made together over the past few years and I can clearly identify the impact that working together has had on my staff, on the service that we provide our customers and, most importantly, in the richer experiences that our mutual customers have when they stay at your hotels.
What it comes down to is this:  Our two organizations share much in common.  Most importantly – our Cardmembers are your guests.  We arrange the holidays and business trips that bring these guests into your hotel and, ideally, we work with many of you to ensure that the travel experience is exceptional from end to end.
Before I close, I want to talk for a minute about the future of the relationship between American Express and Les Clefs d’Or.  Over the past seven years, American Express has been proud to be a sponsor of Les Clefs d’Or.  This year, once again, we have been able to sponsor this event, event.  We make this investment because we see tremendous opportunity in having an established relationship with Les Clefs d’Or both internationally and a local level.
American Express wants to continue to invest in Les Clefs d’Or, and with your support, we can continue to do that.  We will continue to work directly with the various Les Clefs d’Or entities to identify ways that we can work more effectively together.  We need to be sure that there is a central level of coordination so that we are optimizing both our efforts and our investments. Along with my team, and in coordination with Aldo, I authorize the central sponsorships.  Any local support needs to also be coordinated centrally to be sure that we are making the most of investments on both sides.
Your leadership has come to understand the needs and workings of both of our organizations and can well support both of our interests.  There is vast opportunity for this relationship to deliver even more value to both of us.  Once again, I want to reinforce the great opportunities that I believe exist for our organizations to work together even more in the coming year.
I want to close by again thanking Aldo Giacomello for his collaboration and support over the years.  His personal commitment to this relationship is clear and on a completely voluntary basis.  If any of you have any questions or input on how we can make the relationship between our organizations even richer, please talk to Aldo, to me or to Virginia.  We welcome your input and suggestions.  I also want to thank Robert Watson, your International President, who has facilitated the implementation of our relationship from a very practical perspective and is a critical part of our relationship with Les Clefs d’Or.  I also want to thank the entire Executive Committee for the invitation to attend today and for your ongoing support, which has been invaluable to the success of our relationship. Again, my thanks to Toni Daoud and the organising committee for producing such an impressive event. 
Finally, I want to thank YOU.  Thank you for your time, thank you for the opportunity to be here with you, and, most of all, thank you for your friendship.  We are also looking forward to continuing to work with all of you now and into the future. 
We are clearly all in this together, and I am glad that we have all of you on our side.

Sophia Lundberg