Part 1: Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan talks…

• Travel tech and booking tool innovation
• What’s available and what’s missing from the new Concur Travel experience
• The complexities of delivering global NDC through the GDS

SAP Concur Travel continues to roll the new Concur Travel
tool out to customers. BTN editorial director Elizabeth West interviewed for 5Qs
with Business Travel News Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan.  They talked about content and user experience challenges
the new tools are bridging for clients, the limitations of a booking platform in
the face of uneven NDC airline and GDS implementations per market, and also the
need for certain features which weren’t brought over in the first phase of the
rollout, but that buyers have identified as essential before than can adopt the
new experience. Below is an edited version of their conversation. The conclusion
of the interview will appear on BTN tomorrow along with the video interview in
its entirety.

BTN: Buyers continues to struggle with corporate booking tools and the
broader tech set that brings travel content together and offers the user
experience to their travelers. When you look at the travel technology
landscape, what do you like to see in terms of innovation and competition? And
does anything concern you with the direction of innovation right now?

Charlie Sultan: The pace of innovation right now is probably unparallel
to anything that we’ve seen, and I think that’ll probably make it more important
for travel buyers out there to be looking for real technology partners and
maybe that changes their criteria of what they’ve been looking for a little
bit. … At its core, the booking tool provides a place for travel managers to
administer travel policy, display discounts from preferred suppliers so that
the travelers have a place to book their business travel in compliance with
policy. The savvy companies that want to benefit from one integrated experience
figured out that putting their travel and expense together with one company
made them more productive, made the employee experience so much better.

Over time travelers have really come to expect a modern
looking user interface on both mobile and desktop, which is one of the main
changes that they’ll start seeing as they start adopting the new Concur Travel.
But there’s really obviously a lot more than just the new look. … But obviously
I think anyone who has a program that is growing that has maybe a global
footprint that has more complexity to it, understands that there’s a lot more
than just what is on the glossy surface that matters and you really need
someone who can manage the unparalleled complexity that the space is bringing.

BTN: So there’s been a lot of talk about more self-architected
solutions for travel buyers who want to take pieces of technology and put the
ecosystem together themselves. I thought you might have a comment about that and
what you see as the future of that trend.

Sultan: One of the things that we’ve done over time is we’ve
created a customer paradigm where our customers probably have the most choice
of any of the other solutions out there. So if you want to choose your own TMC,
we give you that option. If you want to choose your own GDS, you have that
option. If you want to choose from one of more than 700 partners out there who
can do different things for you, whether it’s VAT recovery, whether it’s
gamification, whether it’s messaging, we have those options. We’ve really tried
over time to listen to what our customers are asking us for and realizing that
listen, one company cannot solve all of the problems, and so we need to have
ways that people can customize their programs and grab some of the best in
class solutions without necessarily being wed to one set of TMC solutions or
one set of GDS solutions or one set of booking tool solutions.

So we’ve tried to open up as much as we can there to
partners to integrate. I’m guessing that what you’re talking about is a little
bit more, where some of the travel programs who have a lot of resources at
their disposal and really want to take on some of the bifurcation of some of
these services, they’re starting to do that. And, listen, for them that might
be a good solution to some of the problems.

Probably a lot of those programs are also reacting to some
frustration that might’ve occurred over the last 10 years as their perception
was that the ecosystem wasn’t moving fast enough and they wanted to take some
of those matters into their own hands. But for us it’s really about listening
to the customers, ensuring that each of those things that they might feel like
they need different solutions for, that they can accomplish that within our
system and still continue to retain all of the benefits of integrated travel
expense management and further on going into, as I talked about, the rapid
speed of innovation really, I think that’s really going to be one of the
biggest things that we see impacting programs going forward, and it’s going to
be a lot easier to manage that with one trusted industry leader.

BTN: Clients are now beginning to implement what everyone’s calling Concur
T2. How is that going? Are most companies making that transition? Have there
been any particular challenges emerging as they go through that process?

Sultan: New Concur Travel launched starting last October on
Sabre, mostly starting in the U.S. marketplace. Now it’s rolled out through the
UK, Ireland, Mexico, and it continues to roll out to more and more countries.
Amadeus will be coming later this quarter, and so more and more of the
countries in Europe will also start to benefit from the new Concur travel. Companies
[also] have a little bit of change management to do because [they want to]
communicate to their employees what’s changing in some of their tools… the new
content, new rail content, new hotel, the new imagery. We’ve got new direct
hotel integrations to GBTs hotel content to BCDs to CWT RoomIt, HRS, FCM. We’ve
got new UK rail content with more countries rolling out. We’ve got fantastic
new sustainability attributes. …

Obviously, [there’s] the user experience, which we touched
upon a little bit earlier. People are wanting to see a lot more imagery, a lot
more content, a lot more options on the first search. And then we are debuting
a lot of our business AI capabilities. And so overall the feedback has been
great.

BTN: Did all the features make it into the first phase of the rollout,
or are you prioritizing certain features to bring in?

Sultan: Anytime you’re rolling out new technology, you’re not
bringing everything that you had in the past available at once. So there are
some customers that have been waiting for some features that weren’t available
at launch that are coming later in this quarter. We continue to see growth
pretty much every week and the number of bookings coming through the new Concur
Travel. And once we enable a few more of those features later this quarter, we
expect to see another big jump in activity.

Hold reservation was a feature that we didn’t really see
as being that critical to bring over because a lot of the airlines have changed
their change policies [and] you can typically void a ticket within 24 hours. But
a lot of our customers came back and said that was something they were
depending on. So you’ll see that coming later this quarter or at the beginning
of next quarter. Pre-trip changes was really the big one that we also saw the
customers were asking for. And so that’s on the public roadmap for Q3, so
that’s going to be ready as well. Multi-City search was another, which
honestly, in the new experience for those that have migrated over, it is not
something they can’t use, but it’s a feature where it sort of takes you back
into the old look and feel and the old experience.

Then the matrix was something that a lot of customers
[preferred]—the matrix that kind of showed you all of the different airlines in
one little quick screen. A lot of the testing we had done indicated that wasn’t
really the cutting-edge view, but I think a lot of our customers were really
used to it, really liked it. So we’re bringing back some version of the matrix
later on this year.

Those are sort of the key things that customers were
telling us, “Hey, once you have that, I’ll be ready to move.” But then there’s
a lot of other customers who’ve been very excited to move. They wanted NDC
through the GDS, they wanted some of the better UX, they wanted some of the
hotel aggregation that’s happening. And so a lot of those customers have moved
and they’re very excited to be able to have the same experience on mobile and
desktop as well.

BTN: You mentioned the NDC component. To this point, Concur really
served most of that NDC content through Travel Fusion. Customers wanted it
through the GDS and you’ve got Sabre out now. Will Amadeus and Travelport both
be implemented with NDC by year’s end?

Sultan: Amadeus will be the next one going live, and so they’ll
be live within the next several months. And with Amadeus, obviously they’ll
have NDC content as well. They’ll have Air France and KLM in addition to the
American and the United connections that are already there. … We’re actually
trying to put together a matrix to help our customers out because not all of
the GDSs have all of the airline content in all of the markets for NDC. So as
that’s becoming available, we’re making sure to integrate it. But like you
said, we’ve had NDC content for several years now, and so now this is just a
matter of trying to make it available through the GDS for those that want it
that way. … Where the GDSs may not have the content or where the TMCs may not
be quite ready to enable it, we also have our TripLink product, which allows
the travelers to go directly to the supplier sites and save really anywhere
from $25 to $150 on some of those NDC transactions.

BTN: NDC bookings through the GDS are still vanishingly small right
now. What effect should a successful Concur T2 rollout have on GDS-powered NDC
bookings?

Sultan: To be honest, I’ve been a little bit surprised at how
slow the rollouts have been because it seems like through every step in the
process, there’s been something else to point to that is missing. And given the
vast savings, certainly with American Airlines, I think United as well [and
with] Lufthansa you sort have two factors at play, right? You have these
distribution cost charges that Lufthansa originated and it got added on by Air
France and got added on by BA and others where they’re charging 15 or 20 euros
[to book through the GDS]. So I thought that might be something that would
drive customers over, and it has driven some customers over. Then I think we
heard disproportionately from all of our TMC partners, “Hey, it’s going to be a
lot easier when this is available through the GDS.” And so we prioritize that.

We sped up our efforts to get that up and live. And I’m
still surprised at how few customers have taken up that opportunity. I do
believe that … infamous list of 160-plus things that GBT put out that they
needed fixed. And to everyone’s credit, to American’s credit, Sabre, Amadeus,
United, everyone else, they’ve been chipping away at that list. From our
perspective, we’ve demoed it, we’ve shown it, we’ve booked through it. … It
doesn’t have every single feature that the legacy EDIFACT has, but shopping,
booking some of the servicing, that’s there. I do expect to see more and more
travel managers who start looking at some of these price differentials, start
taking a bigger and bigger dip into the pool. And certainly as they start
migrating to the new Concur Travel and more and more customers move that way,
that’ll be a more seamless option for them as well.

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Look for Part 2 of BTN’s interview with Concur Travel
President Charlie Sultan tomorrow.