New partnerships announced during the past week by Concur with Amadeus and American Express Business Travel indicate a continued interest in integrated travel and expensesolutions but also demonstrate the travel booking and expense management vendor's focus on global expansion.
Amadeus and Concur on Tuesday announced a "long-term," multiyear alliance with plans by the second half of this year to integrate Amadeus' eTravel Management booking tool with Concur Expense, and Amadeus' ticket reissue service and fare search engine into Concur Cliqbook Travel. Last Thursday, Concur announced that American Express' Business Travel division would begin marketing Concur's travel and expense solution. [Amex Commercial Card already offers Concur's standalone expense product].
During a keynote address at Concur's client conference in Florida this week, chairman and CEO Steve Singh talked about the global economic growth that is expected to make China's economy "the largest in the world by 2030," and India's the third-largest. "How will we see ourselves? How will we flourish amid those global changes?" asked Singh. "Not surprisingly, customers are ahead of us, constantly demanding that we rise to meet their needs."
"We have agreements with all major distribution partners, from FCm to BCD [Travel] to Travelport and Carlson [Wagonlit Travel], to make sure that you're supported on a global basis," said Singh. "In addition to the partnerships just announced, we also added support from Hotels.de, HRS and several others that we'll continue to work on and announce in coming quarters. If you look at this in whole, one day in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to grab your mobile phone and book your flights within India, book hotels in Beijing, restaurants in Israel, sporting events in Madrid and conferences in New York. How will we enable that? Partnerships with global leaders."
Kay Urban, president and CEO of Amadeus Americas, also spoke at the event. Already strong in Europe, Amadeus sees the new Concur relationship "especially in North America" as an opportunity to "further expand our portfolio of IT solutions to the corporate travel market. What Amadeus delivers to Concur is similar in focus."
As Concur executive vice president of worldwide marketing Mike Hilton explained in an interview with The Transnational, Amadeus is "willing to invest in building an integrated travel and expense experience with their online booking tool, and really made the commitment to do the hard work and integrate it into Concur Expense.
"When we looked globally at online booking tool market share, we just saw a really complementary mix here," he added. "Obviously Cliqbook has done extremely well in North America. It has a really good global footprint, but clearly the Amadeus eTravel tool is extremely strong in Europe and continuing to do very well in Asia-Pacific. When we look at our customer base, we see this as an opportunity to give those customers more choice and to really look at the solution that's right for them region by region around the world."
ETravel, he noted, "will be the leading offering for us in Europe [and] Asia-Pacific We're going to continue to invest in Cliqbook; it's still a critical tool for us. We think what we're providing here is choice for customers. Cliqbook is a tool for customers that makes a lot of sense in certain scenarios; certainly if you're a multinational who wants to standardize on a single tool globally it's absolutely the right tool. Maybe if you're a regionally based customer focused in Europe in one or two markets--Amadeus eTravel as you know has pretty significant marketshare presence in Europe today and it very well may be the right choice."
Amadeus North America strategic planning and business development vice president Stewart Alvarez echoed the same: "Working together, we can complement our offerings so we can deliver a much better experience to our mutual customers, be they North American-based, Europe-based or Asia-based customers. They can really pick what solution best meets their needs."
Amadeus plans to continue offering integration with other expense solutions, including the existing relationship with SAP, Alvarez said. "SAP is a great choice for certain segments of the market just as we believe that Concur is a great choice for other segments," he said. "We view this as complementary to expanding the offerings to customers so they can have a broader choice."
'Coopetition'
"We think the travel agency community will be very excited by these relationships, particularly in Europe where the Amadeus tool is very strongly supported by the TMCs," added Concur's Hilton. "A lot of them will view this as a great opportunity to provide more value to their customers. I think they will be an important component of really being able to deliver a great client experience. Having them onboard, the travel agency environment will embrace this to deliver a good experience."
But how do other big TMCs feel about the relationship with American Express, which at the parent company level includes minority ownership of Concur? HRG declined to comment for this article, but officials with BCD Travel and Carlson Wagonlit Travel offered some thoughts.
According to a statement by CWT, "As an integrator of technology, Carlson Wagonlit Travel enjoys a strong partnership with Concur, and others in the industry, to offer clients an array of options to meet their unique requirements and benefit their travel programs. Specific to Concur, we recently signed a new global Cliqbook reseller agreement, and through a lead referral process, we connect clients with expense management requirements to Concur to discuss their needs."
BCD Travel general manager for North America Tom Kallas said, "We have seen no change in the relationship or Concur's willingness to work with us. There was really nothing surprising to us about the announcement from Amex, and in fact it's very similar to what we have been doing for several years with Concur. Given that the travel and expense area is still fairly new and there are a lot of competitors, I think everyone is trying to find their way on where to align themselves."
Some of those competitors include Rearden Commerce and Sabre's GetThere, which are American Express Business Travel's other preferred travel booking technology solutions. According to a Rearden spokeswoman, "This announcement will in no way affect our existing relationship with Amex. They will continue to actively promote" the Amex-Rearden solution, called Axiom.
"GetThere continues to compete effectively against our self-booking tool competitors, regardless of their agency relationships," noted a Sabre spokesman, who added that the company during the past 18 months picked up Accenture, BP and SAP as global accounts. The company has support staff in 15 countries.
~ Mary Ann McNulty contributed to this article