ITW Flips Switch to Concur Locate for Risk Management

ITW global director of travel and expense Cathy Sharpe is a proponent of Concur’s TripLink platform and of meeting her travelers where they are to keep them engaged. She had globalized the ITW program on Concur Travel and Expense by 2015 and opened up her program to TripLink about a year later, citing the lower hotel rates and better services her travelers were getting through consumer channels when compared to bookings made through the travel management company. Since that time, she said, her TMC American Express Global Business Travel has closed the rate gap effectively. That’s good, but she still hasn’t closed up her program. Instead, she went deeper with Concur, picking up the travel tech provider’s Concur Locate product and switching her travel risk management provider from International SOS to Concur’s partner Healix International. 

Why Switch?

Sharpe had lots of considerations for the switch. Despite the claims of streamlined data flows between her agency and ISOS, she said, “The fact of the matter is, [even] before you talk about the open booking data, the TMC data has a hard time making it over [to the travel risk provider].” She added, “If you have a multinational program and you are getting data from all these different sources, there are gaps. We had to look at our reports every day and someone had to take the time to make sure the data was received. If there was a situation that we needed to know who we had in Paris at the moment, we would look at TMC data and the ISOS data because we were concerned that there might be gaps.”

When you factor in the TripLink variable, the data flows get even more complicated. Sharpe was having data sent directly from airlines and other preferred partners to ISOS because Concur was not sharing to risk providers the data coming into the TripLink platform. “Absolutely true,” said Sharpe.

It’s an issue that BTN has reported on before. News broke a year ago of Concur’s foray into risk management, and it put a sharper point on the tech company’s stance: The ability to provide open booking data for risk management had become a competitive advantage—at least for those companies that have adopted TripLink.

According to Concur, that adoption rate is on the rise. A company blog from July states, “To date, TripLink has captured more than 2 million bookings that otherwise would not have been visible to travel managers. Nearly half of these were captured in just the past 10 months.” TripLink has been available to Concur clients since 2013, so the uptick in the last 18 months seems significant.

Concur attributes the growth to the number of suppliers now participating in the TripLink platform. The blog cites 2016 TripLink agreements with British Airways, Iberia and WestJet. None of these are live, though BA is supposed to launch this month. American Airlines, which also inked a TripLink agreement in 2016, plans to launch mid-year. While TripLink also has agreements with Lufthansa, Emirates and Air Canada, United Airlines has been the only airline actually available. TripLink has, however, launched a good number of hotel chains and major car rental companies.

Sharpe’s main concern is hotel data, where compliance to preferred channels declined. Air compliance, on other hand, is good, she said. Plus, United is a key supplier for Sharpe’s program, and even if a supplier is not directly connected in the TripLink system, travelers can always forward their itineraries to Concur or Tripit.

Concur can collect and report all of that data directly to the client and to TMCs that have built connections. Sharpe’s TMC has not invested in that option, so TripLink data was hitting a wall unless ITW had the resources to manage it. Sharpe made the effort, but her resources are slim. “Our team is really small considering the size of the program,” she said. ITW ranked No. 92 in Business Travel News’ 2017 Corporate Travel 100.

Enter Concur Locate

Officially launched in July 2017, Concur Locate incorporates data from bookings captured through TripLink and data from supplier e-receipts that are automatically forwarded to Concur expense, as well as card data that flows through to the Concur expense tool. It adds all that to data from the Concur Travel booking tool and sends it over to its chosen risk partner, U.K.-based Healix International, which—despite a 28-year history—has been a lesser-known risk management player in the U.S. market, where ISOS and iJET have dominated the space. 

The relative anonymity didn’t bother Sharpe; she vetted the new supplier and ran a pilot even while she had ISOS still on board. What matters most in locating travelers is the data universe, she said, and Concur Locate can account for the vast majority of ITW’s travel bookings since the company enjoys 85 percent online booking adoption through the Concur booking tool for air travel, and travelers going outside the preferred channel have access to live TripLink connections. Bookings made with suppliers not live on TripLink should be emailed to Concur to bridge the gap (more on that later). In the three countries where Concur is not available, Sharpe pushes that data directly from Amex GBT to Concur Locate. “We are getting five times the data [compared to] what we were getting before,” said Sharpe.

Concur Locate translates the data into a visual dashboard that shows where ITW people are located—including office locations—so Sharpe has a quick read on any travelers who could be affected by an adverse event. Adverse events are tracked by Healix International sending information into Concur Locate to overlay traveler locations. Once the potentially affected travelers are identified, Healix is responsible for the initial outreach.

“If we identify 20 people who could be affected,” said Sharpe, “Healix does the first well-check and reports back to me, for example, that 17 of the 20 have checked in and one needs assistance.” At that point, ITW can initiate other measures to locate the three employees still in question and quickly direct Healix to help the one actively in need. That’s a change from ITW’s previous protocol, where ITW did the initial outreach. That efficiency has been critical, said Sharpe, because now that the company has the additional data coming into its risk management tools, ITW has realized that more of its employees are affected by adverse events than the company ever realized.

Improved TRM Gets Travelers’ Attention

Soon after launch, hurricanes ricocheted on and off the East Coast and Caribbean, putting ITW’s new tools and protocols in play. “We were able to identify who was there and assist travelers,” said Sharpe. “In fact, there were a few incidents right in a row, and we were able to handle them.”

With the new data, Sharpe said ITW is now reaching out to travelers every week, which is a big change from the prior frequency. “You would never realize how many people are actually in the area when you are leveraging all this additional information. We have a gigantic footprint and folks are also in [affected] places because they live there. We [are putting] a lot more detailed information into our everyday operation,” she said. “You think you are doing a great job, but we sort of know now what we didn’t know.”

Sharpe noted that ITW is still working to understand what types of adverse events really require outreach, and the every-week frequency includes weather and other issues that are “not catastrophic.” Yet, the frequency of the outreach has had an effect on ITW’s traveler population, she said. “They are recognizing that ITW is interested in their safety and security, and we are committed to doing the best we can do the assist them in any type of emergency when they are traveling on behalf of the company.”  

With travelers experiencing tangible improvements, they’ve stepped up their attention as well especially in terms of pretrip preparation. “Because well checks are frequent, it is bringing more attention to the traveler to [do their] homework before they hit road. That’s been a great enhancement,” said Sharpe.

Not 100 Percent Perfect

Sharpe still sees areas for improvement. Not having a huge choice of suppliers with live connections in the TripLink universe is an issue: It puts the onus on travelers engaging with open booking to forward those bookings to the tool. “Some travelers are really good about it,” said Sharpe. “But some really aren’t.” If they don’t forward their bookings, Concur Locate won’t get the data needed to monitor and locate the traveler during the trip.

"There's still data from [suppliers not part of TripLink] sitting out in the abyss. We're not at 100 percent," Sharpe said. So she's working on a solution that includes Traxo, a specialized off-channel data aggregator that competes with Concur in the open booking niche.