HRG Debuts Expense Option

HRG North America this month announced the creation of a Web-based portal and integrated expense management solution, said to deliver a seamless solution for travelers while also improving control for travel managers when processing transactions.

The travel management company said it would work at a client's request to integrate its products with such third-party systems as GetThere and Concur. "If clients already have a booking tool or an expense management tool in play, we'll work to integrate with the tool," said Bill Brindle, business technology director for HRG. "It doesn't mean people have to use our booking tool, but there are advantages because the integration will be a lot closer and tightly cut. Flexibility is key to this. We already work with five or six different online booking tools and we need to discuss with those guys how to integrate."

After an itinerary is booked online, expense management software company Spendvision, which powers HRG's expense tool, provides travel reporting data. "In the course of the next three months, you'll see that become seamless, so it will pass the booking information in and out of the expense tool," Brindle said.

The resulting data—which is integrated directly from any one of roughly 30 cards HRG has relationships with—would be a travel manager's budget, added Shane Bruhns, COO of Spendvision, which has locations in the United Kingdom and Australia. "Creating an expense report will become a lot simpler, because all you're really doing is saying, 'These transactions link to this trip that's already created,' " he said. Though clients have yet to test HRG's online booking portal, 325 corporate clients currently use the expense management tool across 40 countries, according to Bruhns.

HRG isn't the first agency to offer an expense reporting system to clients. American Express and the former WorldTravel BTI have launched similar products. "At the end of the day, they have not been very successful," said consultant Bob Langsfeld of The Corporate Solutions Group in Menlo Park, Calif. "It's not that they don't work—the issue is the real applicability of using that system within a corporation."

HRG's latest offering might appeal most to midmarket clients or travel departments starting their programs from scratch, Langsfeld said.

"Most corporations use enterprise resource planning systems of some sort— Oracle, SAP or PeopleSoft. They're not very conducive to an integrated expense system outside of their processes," he said. "If they're already operating in that environment, creating a separate environment is not high on that list of priorities."

Many agencies are creating a more varied product offering in an effort to increase their value to clients, Langsfeld said. "It's a core competency they don't have, which is going to be a tough one."