Steve Singh
Concur CEO Steve Singh spoke today at The Masters Program here about integrated travel and expense management data amid a "new era of end-user computing" and the impact of sophisticated mobile devices and online communities. After his comments, Singh took questions from participants and Management.travel.
Do you have any bottlenecks in getting data from the major hotel companies?
The bottleneck is always technology and the ability to invest in it. It's never a desire or a lack of understanding the value. It's ultimately cheaper for the hotel and offers the customer a better value equation. The challenge in this environment is whether you have the capital to invest to drive that automation and those electronic receipts. In a tough environment, there's an opportunity to take market share. In some cases, depending on what the long-term value agreement is between us, we'll help subsidize that.
Has that subsidization happened?
We don't speak to the specifics of that. It's not my wish to go subsidize everything, but to the extent that there's value that hotel property can provide us, or our customers, then we're willing to evaluate that. The vast majority of hotel providers say "There's tremendous value to my end customer. I'm willing to go do this." There's a level of competitiveness in there. If Marriott is willing to do this, Hilton is at a disadvantaged position if they're not, because if you stay at the Marriott, you don't need that paper receipt and you don't have to break out that line-item detail.
Would Concur open the system to outside developers?
I can't provide a lot of detail to that yet. It's important to be a member of the community that plays well with the rest of the community. I'll leave it at that for now. The thing we would insist upon in any relationship--whether it's a one-off or broadly speaking--is that both parties have to be committed to the research and development investment to drive that value. What I'm not interested in is a press release that says "We're going to go do stuff together."
In your comments, you mentioned that one of the benefits of integrated travel and expense is a better cost model. Did you mean the pricing structure and model, or that when you buy travel and expense software from the same vendor, you get better economics?
It's those plus more. If you buy an integrated service from one vendor, your cost per transaction ought to be lower than if you buy two individual services from two different vendors. The more interesting part is that with integrated travel booking and expense reporting, you also get integrated data. With that, you can drive a set of analysis that allows you to reduce the dollars spent on travel.
What is the integration of itinerary data doing for the buyer that integration of card data doesn't do?
The itinerary generates the expense report. The expense report gets the credit card data and pulls it in, matches it to the itinerary and says "That's the Alaska Airlines flight you just booked and here's the charge on the credit card, and here's the electronic receipt from Alaska Airlines." Guess what? The price on all three match, so that's done, IRS-compliant ... boom, off it goes into the expense report. Next, say you booked a hotel at $199 a night. In comes the card charge, and, "Hey, it's $219." What happened? Did you charge outside policy? Did you upgrade your room? We have this information in that electronic receipt that we're getting from Marriott. We flag that and say, "This doesn't match what you booked." We'll bring it to the attention of you the employee and also the manager. Without this integration, it's completely manual. To the extent you even catch it, it's utterly manual.