SAP Concur has added several new features to the new booking experience in Concur Travel, including expanded hotel content, in-app emissions data and itinerary sharing via Microsoft Teams. The upgrades will be introduced globally as part of the wider roll-out of the re-platformed Concur Travel, the company announced on Tuesday (19 March).
Expanded hotel content for Concur Travel comes through new direct integrations to American Express Global Business Travel, BCD Travel, CWT RoomIt, Flight Centre Travel Group and HRS, which Concur said adds more options and transparency for hotel bookings.
Concur additionally has added the capability to search and book UK rail content via a partnership with Trainline, and Concur president Charlie Sultan said that integration will help Concur add rail content from other countries more quickly than by establishing direct connects with individual rail providers.
"For each of the incremental countries, we don't have to start at the beginning of the development process," Sultan said. "It's just a matter of understanding how each of the different rail providers is a little bit different and how their schemas are different."
For the emissions data, Concur has integrated with Thrust Carbon to provide those figures for each flight segment as well as for rail and rental car options.
Concur had been pulling in some global distribution system data for emissions, which was "not as dynamic" as what is now being provided through the Thrust partnership, Sultan said.
The Thrust partnership also enables travellers to browse and sort hotel choices by sustainability scores, certifications and emissions, Sultan said. The ability to put policy controls around sustainability ratings is under consideration as well, he said.
Thrust co-founders Kit Aspen and Mark Corbett added the integration will allow corporate users to show travellers their Co2 emissions “without resorting to third-party workarounds”.
“This partnership will usher in a new standard for quality and accessibility of emissions data at point of search,” Aspen said. “The more accessible the data, the better the travel decisions, and the more comprehensive the reporting.”
The new integration with Microsoft Teams enables travellers to share their Concur Travel reservations with colleagues in Teams chat so that those colleagues can book the same trip. The link sent to the colleague will take them directly to the Concur booking tool, according to the company.
Concur rival Cytric launched a similar Teams integration in 2022 and recently added an AI-powered chatbot.
These latest additions to Concur's new booking experience, which launched last year first on the Sabre global distribution system, are part of a continual "evolution" for the tool, Sultan said.
That will include the introduction of air content from Amadeus, both EDIFACT and New Distribution Capability content, which is planned for the second quarter, as is low-cost-carrier content in which direct connections provide better content than available through GDSs.
Amadeus car content will be live in the second quarter as well, he said. In the third quarter, Concur expect to have air, car and hotel content from Travelport and upgraded rail APIs to Deutsche Bahn, according to Sultan.
Concur also is working on a TripIt integration with Microsoft 365, in which confirmation emails coming into Microsoft 365 automatically would be populated into TripIt, Sultan said.
Approval and expense updates
In addition, Concur announced automation to the trip approval process in Concur Travel with Concur Request, which uses generative AI to make trip cost estimates. With an integration to Concur Travel, requests can be automatically generated and completed to simplify the process, Sultan said.
On the expense reporting side, Concur announced a new partnership with Mastercard for a global integration that pulls real-time spending data from Mastercard corporate cards to populate Concur expense reports and issue alerts if additional information is needed or if there is a problem.
"For the traveller, that means they no longer have to grab the restaurant receipt and put it into the expense report. It will automatically populate the expense report, and it will start writing itself,” Sultan said.