Concur Travel has certified corporate lodging and payment platform HRS for its new Hotel Connector API, which will open up a wide range of hotel booking capabilities and controls to mutual clients, the companies announced.
While Concur and HRS have been long-time partners in terms of hotel content, there were limits in the legacy Concur platform in what HRS could present to travelers, HRS chief product officer Martin Biermann said. "Because it was all built on [global distribution system] formatting and prehistoric standards, a lot of the core aspects the traveler would want to identify and compare across properties were not available," he said.
Via Concur's Hotel Connector—with which aggregators and travel management companies can display rates directly into Concur Travel, and for which HRS is the first hotel technology provider be certified—HRS can provide normalized content from its multisource engine, so users can see, filter and compare hotels regardless of the content's source, Biermann said. Users could, for example, filter results to ensure the property has electric vehicle charging available, that it meets sustainability standards or that it accepts a particular type of payment.
Hotel Connector enables HRS to provide Concur users with its Green Stay Initiative data by property, with labeling in "two flavors": one showing that a hotel meets a company's minimum standards and a "champion" label for properties that have outstanding sustainability performance in their market, Biermann said. Travelers can see the carbon footprint of their stay before booking as well, he said.
Users also have the ability to see which rates are coming from which sources to get insights on loyalty, which was not previously available through Concur—such as an online travel agency rate that does not offer loyalty point accrual versus a chain-direct rate that does, Biermann said.
"It is showing a much more consistent and better user experience on the content," he said. "It looks much nicer and more modern, and you get access to much better filtering capabilities, amenity callouts, loyalty attribution, sustainability data and our globally normalized star rating solution."
Additionally, working through Hotel Connector allows HRS to interact with Concur so that its recommendation engine can provide "much more tailored results" to users, Biermann said. Another new capability in Concur with the integration is the use of HRS' AI rate cap engine, which can calculate rate caps for travelers based on current market conditions as well as policy rather than a static rate cap.
HRS and Concur are working together to convert mutual customers to the new Concur Travel throughout the rest of this year, according to the companies. The two companies have a roadmap together and will "be able to unpack much more additional functionality" over the next three quarters, Biermann said.
Concur said the Hotel Connector functionality is another example of its focus on flexibility with the new booking experience, which launched last year. After its launch on Sabre, its recently went live with Amadeus content, and Travelport will be live within the next six months, Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan told BTN during the recent Global Business Travel Association convention.
"We pride ourselves on the fact that we give our customers multiple options by being multi-GDS and multi-TMC," Sultan said. "Customers have a choice of 700 different partners to customize their program how they see it."
HRS, meanwhile, has been expanding its own availability in major platforms, including its expanded partnership with Amadeus' Cytric platform, announced earlier this month.