Self-booking tool provider Sabre Holdings and expense management software vendor Concur Technologies continue to maintain their leadership positions among the 100 largest corporate travel spenders.
According to Business Travel News' annual Corporate Travel 100 research, Sabre in 2002 counted 52 of the 100 companies as self-booking customers, while Concur's expense management clients comprised 26 percent.
Both Concur and Sabre face looming challenges as new breeds of competition emerge, and they continue to work, respectively, on combining disparate technologies.
The two vendors partly are benefiting from recent acquisitions of their largest direct competitors. Concur Technologies last year acquired its rival Captura and increased its marketshare of the largest business travel spenders by adding six CT100 companies. Meanwhile, Sabre in 2000 acquired GetThere, significantly bolstering its position in the fast-changing marketplace for reservations services.
In Concur's case, such CT100 clients as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Motors and Hewlett-Packard remain on the Captura platform. Concur vice president of sales and marketing Elena Donio said that by early 2005, all former Captura clients would be running on Concur software. Coming out of the acquisition, Concur said it was a priority to maintain accounts with Captura's client base.
Meanwhile, Sabre remains the dominant booking player, despite some issues with its migration of Sabre BTS and GetThere users to a new platform
(BTN, Aug. 11). Sabre's share of the largest travel spenders translates to an aggregate U.S. booked air volume tipping $4.3 billion, while TRX—Sabre's closest competitor with 12 percent of CT100 share—holds CT100 accounts that add up to about $611 million in U.S. booked air volume. TRX also is migrating some of its ResAssist users to a new technology called RESX.
For these self-booking market leaders, new competitors abound. "I don't see Sabre winning all the business that was BTS as it's being sunset," said Corporate Solutions Group consultant Robert Lichtman. "It's bound to increase the share among the others, and I see a little bit of that going to Outtask, assuming they remain viable."
None of the CT100 accounts from this year's survey said they were using Outtask's Cliqbook in 2002. However, DaimlerChrysler—with its $66 million U.S. booked air volume—this year signed on to use the product. Also, European vendor KDS found its first CT100 account in New York-based Interpublic. With $70 million in U.S. booked air volume, The Interpublic Group of Cos.—which closed all onsite travel departments last year—this year has set the goal to implement KDS in the United States and complete its rollout in the United Kingdom.
"You've got Cliqbook that's gobbling up some marketshare, and you also have Orbitz and Expedia," said Carol Salcito, president of Management Alternatives. "They're gaining credibility as a complement to a traditional agency relationship, and, for the smaller organizations, it's becoming the agency. The Expedias and Orbitzes of the world do not have the bells and whistles of the established booking tools, but companies are asking, 'Do I need the bells and whistles?' "
Lichtman eventually sees Expedia and its ilk viably vying for a piece of the large corporate market. "They have the basic tools that can be manipulated to handle what the large organizations need," he said, "but, at this point, they're geared for smaller companies."
According to BTN's midmarket research, 59 percent of companies with U.S. booked air volumes between $2 million and $12 million use managed travel tools à la GetThere, while 17 percent send travelers to such online agencies as Expedia and Orbitz.
In expense management, ongoing challenges for Concur include the enterprise resource planning competitors and homegrown systems. Among the CT100 in 2002, SAP was the runner-up vendor, with 7 percent of CT100 share. Yet, 14 percent of CT100 companies use internally developed expense reporting systems, ranging from rudimentary, paper-based expense reporting mechanisms to glorified Excel spreadsheets or high-tech proprietary systems. "When companies say they're using a homegrown expense reporting system, my guess is it's paper or, more times than not, they're using the Excel spreadsheets," Salcito said.
Procter & Gamble gained recognition for sidestepping automation through its offshore insourcing of expense reporting processing. While still using a largely paper-based and hands-on process, the company has managed to streamline the expense process as well as cut costs .