The new user interface, including the website and mobile app, for SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel’s new combined offering Complete will start rolling out “within the course of the next few weeks,” Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan said during the Business Travel Show America conference on Wednesday (15 October).
Sultan and Amex GBT EVP of global and multinational clients David Reimer fielded questions, including several sourced from travel buyers, from BTN Group VP of content Elizabeth West about their recently announced partnership at the kickoff session at the show’s debut in New York.
Sultan said teams from both companies are working jointly to prioritise determining which enhancements should be released next but said the new user interface will be first up in the coming weeks. A pilot group of Egencia customers who want integration into Concur Expense will start later this year, with wider availability in the first quarter of next year, he said.
Both Reimer and Sultan touted the speed at which they would be able to address customer needs jointly with Complete.
“What we are creating is a model that is actually more focused,” Reimer said. “We’ve got resources that are going at a joint plan, one roadmap and one end customer, and that’s going to allow us to move faster and more efficiently, and ultimately the customer will be the beneficiary of that.”
One of the biggest questions this has led to, however, is what this all will mean for those clients who are working with one but not both companies in their travel programmes.
For Amex GBT, Reimer said Complete is “about giving our customers more choice” and said that it would continue to sell its Neo booking tool, which is a competitor to Concur Travel. “We’re not taking anything away,” Reimer said. “Through our Select platform, we have a number of other tools that we support and will continue to support those tools as well.”
SAP Concur, meanwhile, will “continue to innovate and build on” Concur Travel’s new booking experience, which it began to roll out in 2023, Sultan said. Those enhancements would all be available in Complete as well, he said.
“Complete will be able to move at a faster pace and will have additional incremental things, but both platforms will continue to innovate,” Sultan said.
Concur also will continue to work with other travel management companies as resellers but is in the midst of restructuring that programme, he said. Concur already has communicated to TMCs that the Select and Elite levels it offers TMC partners would be discontinued in their current form at the end of this year, and what will replace them is still “a work in progress,” Sultan said.
“The TMCs will still be reselling the product and will service the product, so none of that changes,” he said. “I think some of the particulars of what kind of service they get, what’s included and what they can sponsor, some of those items might change.”
Sultan made the analogy of a group dinner and how it’s easier to select a restaurant with just two people rather than three or more who each have their own opinions about preferred cuisine. SAP Concur faces a similar challenge working with multiple TMCs across their different technologies and structures, he said.
“As I look at where the ecosystem goes forward, the speed of innovation, the speed of technology and the amount of investment that’s going to be required to satiate the needs of people is going to be far greater,” Sultan said. “Continuing to do it and having to coordinate with 100 different people is still doable, but it’s not the fastest way to do it.”
“So, we’re going to go out for Chinese, and if you’d like to join us tomorrow, we can make plans for Thai, but we’re still going to go out for Chinese,” he said.
Whether the expense data related to clients who are Concur customers but do not partner with Amex GBT – i.e. the receipts for those programmes that choose the figurative Thai dinner – will be shared with GBT has been a question many buyers needed to put to bed.
Software providers, social media platforms and other tech suppliers in recent years have come under fire for methods of collecting user data to feed the AI innovation that both GBT and Concur said would be central to their development roadmaps.
“I think it’s great that customers are asking about data and data privacy and how their data is being treated,” Sultan said. “I would venture to say that if anyone started digging into how much we’re spending on data protection relative to what the vast majority of the startups or new entrants are doing, I think that we would be multiples more. We ascribe the strongest EU-driven data privacy standards. So I would love for anyone to compare on that.”
Asked directly whether the data would be shared, the executives were more succinct.
“I don’t see why it would be,” said Sultan.
“No, it shouldn’t be, quite frankly,” added Reimer.
A full transcript of West’s interview with Reimer and Sultan will be published later this week.
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