Interview: Concur CEO on Making Sense of Business Travel Chaos

Editor's Note: Skift is publishing a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and the evolving habits and device preferences of travel consumers. Check out all the interviews as they come out, here. Concur CEO Steve Singh believes companies can't force their employees to book business trips in a uniform manner, that providers have to adapt to diverse booking behaviors, and to build the behind-the-scenes technology to deliver on that premise. Despite Concur's advocacy of its TripLink open booking solution, Singh is under no illusions that TripLink will be "the" solitary industry solution, and he offers a vision of the "perfect trip," and what the travel industry needs to do to get there. Following is an edited transcript of a conversation Skift conducted with Singh on the future of travel booking: Skift: Concur obviously has a lot of experience in how business travelers book their trips. You acquired the Cliqbook corporate booking tool way back in 2006, and your open booking initiative, TripLink, is picking up partners from what I hear. Where do you see business travelers’ booking behaviors heading and what does it say about the future of travel booking? Steve Singh: I think the overriding concept, and how we look at the world, is that you want to embrace the behavior of the individual. And you want to make it easier for them to do whatever it is they need to do. The patterns we are seeing in the world, the patterns we are seeing by cloud computing, by mobile computing, allow the individual to work in the model that they want to work. Embrace that behavior, capture the information that is necessary for them to get the results they are looking for. And then work behind the scenes to make sure you are meeting corporate objectives. I think specifically in the case of corporate travel, business travelers will book in multiple different locations. I don't think this is a move to one model. I