SAP Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan
With increasing rail content and a recent rollout in India, the new Concur Travel experience rollout is about 80 percent complete, SAP Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan said during the recent Business Travel Show Europe in London.
Concur Travel is approaching the third anniversary of the announcement of its new booking experience and the subsequent phased rollout that has been ongoing ever since. It went live in India in late May, which was the "last remaining" key market for Concur, Sultan said.
At this point, Sultan said much of the remaining migration work is with clients that are using legacy Travelport global distribution systems such as Worldspan and Galileo, from which Travelport has been migrating users to its global Travelport Plus platform. "A lot of the [travel management companies] out there might not have moved to the same platform yet to allow them to take advantage of it, so we're beholden to that time schedule to take care of those," he said.
Beyond that, Sultan said there are few scattered instances in which TMCs either are not yet able to support the transition or that there is still some unique functionality missing preventing the migration, "but for the most part, people are moving and are really excited about the features and functionality."
Rail content is one area in which Concur has spent a "substantial amount" for the platform, said Paul Dear, SAP Concur regional VP for supplier services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In June, Concur integrated content from Spanish rail providers Renfe and Iryo via booking platform Trainline Partner Solutions. Content from French rail provider SNCF also is going live in the platform, and Concur will have pilots for content from Italian rail provider Trenitalia in the third quarter, Dear said.
The rail content also allows users to book on one provider in one direction and a different provider in the other direction, he said.
"As we add more and more countries, you can do that across the borders," Dear said. "For example, you can go from Lyon to Barcelona on SNCF and Renfe or Iryo, depending on who you choose. It almost gets to the point where you can remove short-haul air travel, reducing CO2 emissions."
Concur also has added split ticketing in the U.K., in which multiple tickets between destinations can be bought instead of a single ticket when it reduces the total cost, he added.
Complete Update
As for Complete, Concur's integrated offering with American Express Global Business Travel, Sultan said "a bulk of the customers have transitioned over to it, but for the most part, it's still early."
One of the projects in the queue for Complete is a new chat pilot, in which the most frequent use cases in calls to agents have been automated. When the chat tool cannot handle the request, the platform offers a "warm transfer" to a live agent who already has the background around the user's request, Sultan said.
Complete also has a new travel manager portal under development, which will bring data together from both sides, he said.
"It's how do we redesign all the things that the travel manager needs," Sultan said. "How do we use AI, so instead of needing to figure out some settings or filters to enact your policy, how do you go to the chatbot and say, 'I want to create a policy that is a lowest logical fare policy within $50 for domestic flights with these parameters,' and having the tool show you the configuration settings. You can tweak them without starting from scratch."
SAP Concur Business Travel Survey Results
Concur recently released its annual SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey, which included responses from 800 travel managers, 700 CFOs and 3,300 business travelers fielded April 1 to April 20.
Sultan highlighted the data that showed travel managers overwhelmingly desire more support from their organization to achieve their goals. In the survey, 84 percent of travel managers said they could not meet fully their organization's business goals without more support from their CFOs. Among the top needs listed by travel managers from their CFOs were better data to prove ROI (44 percent of respondents), AI training (43 percent of respondents), better buy-in on policy changes (42 percent of respondents) and more staffing and resources (41 percent of respondents).
Among CFO respondents, 89 percent said their travel manager needs to do a better job justifying how their travel program helps to meet business goals, according to the survey.
Business travelers, meanwhile, are expecting more from their companies regarding traveler safety, according to the survey. While more traveler respondents said they are most responsible for their own safety than placing that primary responsibility on their employer—37 percent saying they bore responsibility compared with 27 percent saying their company did—that marks an increase over the past several years. In Concur's 2020 survey, only 18 percent said their company was primarily responsible for their safety while traveling.
Older travelers were more likely to consider themselves responsible for safety while traveling, with 47 percent of boomers and 43 percent of Gen X travelers saying so compared with 35 percent of millennials and 33 percent on Gen Z travelers, Concur said.
Among travel managers, 87 percent said their company should be doing more to protect employees while traveling, according to the survey.
Sultan said he was surprised that only 38 percent of CFOs in the survey said their organization was completely responsible for ensuring employee safety. While 57 percent said their organization was somewhat responsible for traveler safety, they thought the bigger responsibility was on the traveler.
"For years, coming to conferences and meeting with people, there's such a high focus from travel buyers in making sure they are fulfilling their duty of care," Sultan said. "It surprised me to see that so many companies didn't think it was their responsibility."