Concur Wants to Deliver a Consumer-Grade Experience to Business Travelers

Editor's Note: A year ago, Skift expanded its coverage of corporate travel with more frequent stories and a dedicated newsletter. The Corporate Travel Innovation Report focuses on the future of corporate travel by examining the big fault lines of disruption for travel managers and buyers, the innovations emerging from the sector, and the changing business traveler habits that are upending how corporate travel is packaged, bought, and sold. In this series of stories and one-on-one interviews, we explore some of the latest trends, technology, and external forces causing corporate travel to evolve. You can read the rest of the articles in this series here. Subscribe to the Corporate Travel Innovation Report Mike Eberhard jokes that his second home is "usually a seat assignment." As a frequent traveler and longtime employee of Concur, the travel and expense management giant, Eberhard has plenty of ideas about how his product can evolve to make the process of booking and expensing travel easier for users. "I've traveled between 250,000 and 350,000 miles a year, so I definitely exercise and push the boundaries of our own product and understand what it's like to be a traveler," he said. "I try and bring that back into our vision as much as I can." After working for Concur, a unit of SAP, since 2003, Eberhard was named president of the company late last year. He spoke to Skift recently about priorities and challenges, the recent acquisition of Hipmunk, and the need to keep in touch with users. Skift: You've been in the job for a few months now. What are your biggest priorities for 2017 but also looking to the slightly longer term? Eberhard: From an industry standpoint, corporate travel is a $1.2 trillion industry today, and I think GBTA projects it'll be about $1.6 trillion in 2020. For Concur to be successful, it's important that we not only focus on meeting the needs of businesses and travelers today but we also play the role of anticipating the needs of the business and the travelers tomorrow. Our top priority is our customer. The key challenges for our customer right now is trying to ensure that what you're delivering from a corporate solution is something that has consumer-grade experience for their travelers. We have a tremendous amount of passion about delivering consumer-grade experience. Consumerization is driving rapid massive evolution of the corporate travel industry today. In the future, I think, successful business a