Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide on Monday became the second major hotel company to integrate and go live with Concur's TripLink open-booking platform.
The integration links travelers' Starwood Preferred Guest profiles and Concur profiles, giving them "a more seamless process while giving the travel manager a better spend management perspective as well as duty of care," Starwood vice president of global corporate sales Alice Harrington-Caravello said. Travelers booking through the SPG sites or Starwood brand sites will be able to see and book their companies' preferred rates, and Starwood also will automatically populate expense reports with folio data, she said.
Starwood joins InterContinental Hotels Group as major hotel companies that have integrated with TripLink. Marriott International also has been announced as a partner and is expected to go live by the end of the year.
Starwood on Monday also announced a new corporate business travel program in which travel buyers can earn discounts and SPG elite status levels for travelers based on their volume of business with Starwood.
Through the program, travel buyers earn discounts off best available rates as high as 7 percent as well as a select number of gold and platinum statuses they can bestow on their travelers, Starwood director of new business development and prospecting Jonathan Kaplan said. Buyers also get access to online reporting and tracking tools for their program, he said.
The program replaces the points-based Starwood Preferred Business program. Kaplan said feedback from travel buyers indicated the program was confusing in its explanation of how to redeem the points and that they "would much rather get true discounts so they can show their CFOs the value of the program."
Starwood plans to start the new program on Oct. 15, and is registering corporations for it in the interim.