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The $6.3 billion take-private acquisition of Amex GBT by Long Lake Management, announced Monday, is the largest corporate travel deal in years. It’s also the final chapter of an ownership saga that began in 2014 when American Express carved out its business travel division into a joint venture with a Greg O’Hara’s Certares-led investor consortium.
It wound through a failed $5 billion recapitalization, a pandemic, a SPAC debut, a $326 million paper loss for Expedia, the acquisition of CWT, and now a go-private deal led by a two-year-old AI-focused holding company backed by the same investors behind Anthropic and OpenAI.
The cap table at exit tells you who played the 12-year game well and who didn’t. Skift used AI analysis to compile the cap table.
American Express: The Unambiguous Winner
American Express walks away with approximately $1.5 billion in cash and a confirmed $975 million pre-tax gain, according to an 8-K the company filed Monday. The gain was not included in Amex’s previously issued 2026 earnings guidance — meaning it will show up as a one-time windfall when the deal closes in the second half of the year.
Amex holds 157.8 million shares, or 30.1 percent of Amex GBT, on a carrying value of roughly $525 million. At $9.50 per share, that’s a nearly 3x return on the carrying basis. But the return is even better than the numbers suggest because Amex never actually wrote a check.
In 2014, it contributed its Global Business Travel division to a joint venture with a consortium organized by Certares and anchored by the Qatar Investment Authority. The consortium put in $900 million cash for 50 percent; Amex contributed the operating business for the other 50 percent. The $900 million went into the business, not to Amex. Since then, Amex has provided a Amex GBT a royalty-free license to use the “American Express Global Business Travel” name.
And that’s the kicker: the Amex brand license survives the take-private. Long Lake confirmed the brand-licensing agreement remains in place post-close. Amex keeps getting paid on a business it no longer owns, no longer operates, and now holds zero equity in.
In another financial filing Monday, Amex confirmed the company “expects to dispose of its Stockholder Securities pursuant to such transactions upon the closing thereof” — full cash exit, no equity rollover into Long Lake’s private vehicle.
Expedia: The Structural Loser
Expedia’s position in Amex GBT was never a traditional investment. It was the byproduct of a corporate disposal.
In November 2021, Expedia sold its corporate travel division Egencia to Amex GBT in an all-stock transaction. Expedia took a 19 percent stake initially valued at $815 million on its books. The deal was a Peter Kern-era restructuring move — shed operational complexity, take a minority equity position, ride someone else’s growth.
It didn’t work out that way. The May 2022 SPAC diluted Expedia’s stake to about 16 percent. The CWT acquisition in September 2025 diluted it further to 14.3 percent. And the stock spent most of the intervening years trading well below the $10 SPAC price. By early 2024, Expedia had recorded $326 million in cumulative mark-to-market losses on the position — $300 million in 2022 and another $26 million in 2023.
The Long Lake deal at $9.50 per share recovers much of that pain. Expedia’s 74.8 million shares are worth roughly $711 million at the deal price. But that’s still approximately $104 million below the $815 million book value at which Expedia originally recorded the stake, before accounting for five years of time value on capital that sat in a stock Expedia couldn’t control.
The equity stake was only part of the transaction. The Egencia deal also included a 10-year lodging supply agreement under which Amex GBT’s corporate hotel bookings flow through Expedia’s inventory. That commercial relationship generates ongoing revenue and appears to survive the change of control — the voting agreement Expedia signed includes a provision waiving any change-of-control termination rights on commercial contracts with Amex GBT.
The supply agreement may ultimately prove to be worth more than the equity ever was.
But as a capital allocation decision — trading an operating business for a minority stake you can’t control in a company that then went through a SPAC, a pandemic recovery, and a take-private — the Egencia disposal was a net negative on Expedia’s books.
Expedia Group commented in a statement: “Our commercial partnership with AMEX GBT remains strong and unchanged by this transaction and continues to be strategically important to Expedia Group.”
Certares: Financials Are Private, Unknowable
Greg O’Hara’s Certares was the architect of the entire structure. O’Hara organized the Juweel investor consortium in 2014, served as chairman of Amex GBT’s board for 12 years, and built Certares into a $6.2 billion assets under management, travel-focused investment firm with Amex GBT as its anchor reference deal.
Today, entities controlled by O’Hara hold approximately 20 million shares, or 3.8 percent of Amex GBT, worth roughly $191 million at $9.50. That’s the number you can calculate from public filings.
What you can’t calculate is the total return. Certares was the general partner of the Juweel investment vehicle, meaning it collected management fees and carried interest on the entire consortium’s position as the enterprise value grew from $1.8 billion in 2014 to $6.3 billion today.
The original splits among the five Juweel co-investors were redacted in the European Commission’s 2014 merger filing and have never been publicly disclosed.
Certares also took intermediate liquidity along the way. The Juweel vehicle was dissolved in January 2024, distributing shares directly to its members. Before that, the 2019 recapitalization process and the SPAC created opportunities for cash distribution. The fact that O’Hara’s controlled entities hold only 3.8 percent today, down from what was likely a meaningfully larger original position, tells you capital came off the table at earlier stages.
The honest assessment: Certares’ total economic capture from the Amex GBT investment — including carry, fees, intermediate distributions, and the franchise value it created for Certares as a firm — exists only on internal fund statements. O’Hara did well. How well is a number no one outside Certares will likely ever see.
The AI Thesis Behind the Deal
Long Lake Management was co-founded in 2023 by Alex Taubman, formerly of Oaktree Capital Management, and Zach Frankl, a co-founder of Ramp. It is backed by General Catalyst, Alpha Wave Global, Elad Gil, D1 Capital, and Thrive Capital. General Catalyst’s Ken Chenault — the former American Express CEO — is closely involved. Chenault’s presence is likely what enabled the brand-licensing continuity with his former company.
Chenault is also an Airbnb board member.
Long Lake’s playbook to date has been acquiring traditional service businesses and layering AI tools onto their operations. Its prior portfolio consists of 18 homeowners’-association management firms. General Catalyst has reported 25–30 percent productivity gains from AI tools deployed in those businesses.
Amex GBT, with approximately 22,000 employees, $2.7 billion in revenue, and an 18 percent adjusted EBITDA margin, is an order of magnitude larger than anything Long Lake has previously attempted. The thesis is that corporate travel management, including bookings, itinerary changes, cancellations, expense reconciliation, and meetings logistics, is exactly the kind of high-volume, partially deterministic workflow that AI agents now handle competently.
Travel, however, is a complex business, and Amex GBT states it’s committed to keeping human travel agents involved in the process, although their role may get significantly diminished. If Long Lake can compress the cost structure while maintaining or growing revenue per client, the return on a roughly $3.8 billion equity check could be substantial.
Whether that works at this scale is the open question. The deal is financed with $2.5 billion in committed bank debt from JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, and MUFG, plus equity from Long Lake’s investors and Koch Equity Development.
The 22,000 Amex GBT employees who process the world’s corporate travel may have a different view of what AI-driven productivity gains mean for their jobs.
Correction: American Express gives Amex GBT the right to use its brand for free. There are no royalty payments.
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