Concur EVP of global products Tim MacDonald talks:
- Airlines going live on TripLink in 2017
- Concur's breaks with Egencia & Amex GBTravel
- Branded fares on Concur Travel
In January, United Airlines made live its direct connection
to TripLink, becoming the first airline to give travelers direct access to
corporate-negotiated rates from its website. The move also provides travel managers the ability
to capture off-channel bookings. Meanwhile, Concur has recognized customers'
increasing taste for virtual payments and will enable them by midyear. EVP of
global products Tim MacDonald spoke with BTN payment and expense editor JoAnn
DeLuna.
BTN: After a more
than a two-year delay, United Airlines has gone live with TripLink. What has
that meant for TripLink adoption, and will more suppliers connect this year?
MacDonald: More suppliers
are going live. That's really boosted the value that our customers are realizing.
United just went live in January, and we've seen a tremendous amount of itineraries
coming through. American Airlines, British Airways and Iberia should be fast
behind them. They will be staggered throughout the entire year.
BTN: How many companies
have signed up as TripLink users?
MacDonald: We
have over 8,000 customers signed up. We saw rapid growth in 2016 across two
different dimensions. One is the uptick in implementations by customers. Many
customers have purchased TripLink but deferred implementation by a few months. 2016
was the year when a large number of customers implemented TripLink. Combined with
that was the significant uptick in suppliers going live, then the dramatic
improvement in driving end-user adoption, meaning getting travelers to connect
accounts with suppliers, downloading and using TripLink. All that taken
together led to a significant increase in the number of itineraries customers
are now seeing than they've never been able to see historically.
BTN: Do you mean
itineraries forwarded to Concur or itineraries provided to TripLink by
suppliers?
MacDonald: TripLink
is increasingly capturing bookings as they happen with suppliers. We've seen a 1,000
percent increase in the number of users connected, meaning: When they go to
participating suppliers and make bookings there, we will automatically get the
itinerary. The overall objective is to give customers increasing visibility into
travel that's being booked without encouraging users to book direct. We do that
through a combination of supplier-direct integrations that allow us to capture
bookings as they happen on supplier sites, along with TripIt. Some users will
get more itineraries through TripIt, but the idea is to cast as wide a net as
possible so we can get increasing visibility and ability for those travel managers
to manage all of their travel, not just what's going through traditional
channels.
BTN: With all the
talk about TripLink, is the company still investing in Concur Travel?
MacDonald: Yes,
in very big way. The significant investments we're making now are in ensuring [that]
our customers and travelers can see branded fares and [that] customers can effectively
manage those. We've seen an explosion in unbundled fare families from all
airlines. It started with some of the international carriers, but now we see it
happening in the U.S. We have customers that don't want certain fare types to
show up to travelers. That's a significant investment we're making because we
have to enable that across every carrier and across every [global distribution
system], and we'll be rolling that out in the first [half] of 2017 across each
carrier and GDS.
Another big investment is in virtual pay. More and more
customers want to adopt virtual pay for travel, so we are enabling virtual pay
for our TMC partners and then will be enabling that for our customers in Concur
Travel in the middle of this year. We're working with all the different virtual
pay providers out there so customers can use whatever virtual card or bank they
want to use in Concur Travel & Expense.
BTN: Concur
recently ended its partnerships with Egencia and American Express Global
Business Travel. Can we expect more of Concur's relationships with TMCs to end?
MacDonald: Absolutely
not. Egencia and Concur have decided to continue to support our existing mutual
clients but will not add new ones. We have a high bar on customer experience,
and despite our efforts on both sides, we just weren't able to meet those. We [also]
continue to work very closely with American Express Global Business Travel. We have
thousands of mutual customers that we work with together everyday, and there are
customers getting added all the time that use Concur products and GBT as their
TMC. We are deepening and expanding our relationships with TMCs every quarter.
BTN: It's been a
few years since Concur scrapped its Price-to-Beat gamification tool, and the
company recently deepened its partnership with Rocketrip.
Why?
MacDonald:
We didn't see customer adoption for [Price-to-Beat].
Our feature was ahead of its time. Rocketrip came along and offered a similar
but considerably evolved experience. It's been a great partnership, wherein we
can continue to offer that value to our customers. That's proven to be more
effective than supporting the feature that we developed.