SAP Concur Top Boss Touts New Business Travel Platform

The head of SAP Concur, the most-used travel and expense management platform, said the company had made significant strides with its newest travel booking platform.

Charlie Sultan, president, said that the phased rollout of the new Concur Travel, which began nearly a year ago, has become widely available in major markets.

"It's a consumer-grade UX [user experience] now," Sultan said. "It shows the traveler a lot more options on the first screen of your search results. You can see the seat maps on airplanes a lot clearer now. Booking hotels and car rentals is more streamlined. The info is richer. For example, if you want to know if your hotel has an EV charging station, that is listed."

Sultan spoke at the Global Business Travel Association annual conference in Atlanta on Monday, where Concur displayed the new Concur Travel with its revamped interface. The interface felt more intuitive to use than the previous one in a Skift test.

Concur as an expense giant

SAP Concur enjoys a dominant market position as a brand for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management. IDC estimates that Concur has about 51% market share, though that might be conservative, given that a majority of the largest corporate travel buyers use Concur.

In 2014, SAP acquired Concur for an enterprise value of $8.3 billion. At the time, Concur had 25 million active users. Today, 94 million individuals have access to its services through their employers.

Adding travel content

A key Concur focus this year has been on incorporating New Distribution Capability (NDC) content.

Since September, the new Concur Travel has become compatible with Amadeus and Sabre, the two most widely used global distribution systems, in many key countries, for American and United bookings done through the so-called new distribution capability (NDC) instead of the older Edifact method. Integration with Travelport, the third-largest player, is expected within six months.

Concur has also become more tightly integrated with other SAP systems.

"The more of your company's data you have going through a unified system, the better everything gets," Sultan said.

“We want to create a world where travel and expenses manage themselves," he said.

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