TripLink Star Rises, Sustainability Will get Extra Focus

BTN editorial director Elizabeth West continues her inteview with Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan. In part two, they talk about the rising prominence of TripLink among Concur’s solution set and among the travel buyer’s evolving took kit in the face of airline content fragmentation and gaps in industry readiness for New Distribution Capability strategies. Also, the growing focus on business travel sustainability initiatives among Concur clients, and how the new Concur Travel booking tool is laying a foundation for future, more advanced solutions. This interview is edited for clarity.

Related: This is the second installment of a two-part interview. Read Part 1.

BTN: Let’s talk about Triplink… with all the fragmentation in the
airline space, thanks to NDC, the preference to go to the dot-coms is there.
What pickup have you seen in the past year, and are there any enhancements on
the way to make it more robust? 

Sultan: TripLink allows … a company to get their corporate
negotiated rates on United.com, on Delta, on AA, on Marriott, on Avis, and a
whole slew of other suppliers out there. … The data flows right back into their
Concur ecosystem. It really started out as a product where travel managers who were
afraid of their blind spend … wanted to be able to track it. They stepped their
toes into it, but they didn’t want to promote it to a lot of travelers. We’ve
now seen… [companies that] configure their Concur Travel instance … to have a
pop-up message that says, “Hey, if you’re looking for tickets on these
airlines, you might find a better rate going directly to the airline site.” You
would not have seen that 10 years ago. A lot of savvy travel managers now realize
[they] can still manage travel and save [the] company money, [and are] trying
to figure out different ways to do it. They’re either not ready for NDC or
their TMCs don’t want to support NDC or whatever the attributes are, their
travelers just want to book direct. They’re really worried about traveler
experience and employee experience. And so we’re seeing a lot of activity
there. 

To your question on innovations, we launched what we call
a Concur TripLink hub earlier this year, which is really a new home within the
Concur solutions that helps streamline the enrollment for travelers to get into
TripLink and TripIt Pro. We continue to enhance the TripIt Pro product … with
risk alerts, real-time alerts when something might impact their trip. … In the
last couple of weeks, we launched the Amtrak solution, so Amtrak
is now live with TripLink. Ryan
Air is going to be coming later this year… and we’re still expecting and
hoping that Southwest is going to have their integration live hopefully by the
end of this year [editor’s note: Southwest’s intent
to participate was announced in 2021].

BTN: Many travel buyers rely on their
TMCs for reporting. Does Concur enable TMCs to access the client data to consolidate
that—and, more importantly, do you see more TMCs doing that for clients, given
the fragmentation?

Sultan: There’s an API available for the TMCs so they can come
and access all of the data as well. The same way the travel manager can get the
data as soon as the trip is being booked. Really, if I go book a trip on United.com
right now, our travel manager will know about it probably in about 30 seconds
to two minutes. They can send an email [to me] based on that [booking], if they
want to administer policy on it. Since that data is coming back into the Concur
ecosystem, the TMCs, the Duty of Care providers can also integrate to those
same APIs so they can capture all of the trips and help their companies manage
that. 

BTN: Are TMCs actually doing that? 

It’s mixed. It’s very much driven by the customer demand. If
you kind of look at some of the big TripLink proponents who are out there and speak
frequently at events or that tout the product, they’re very engaged in their
programs and they’re asking their TMCs to help them manage it and do things
with it. I think other companies sort of aggregate it themselves, but the
feature is there and available for anyone who wants access to it.

BTN: I also want to touch on sustainability, and you mentioned already
some features of the new Concur Travel in this regard. Travel buyers are being
asked to do a lot and many have been frustrated with the information available at
the point of sale for traveler decision-making or need better reporting. What’s
available now and what are your go-forward plans on delivering that?

Sultan: We’ve seen much more discussion coming from companies
wanting to prioritize sustainable business travel. We’re in the process of
reviewing our annual SAP Global Business Travel survey, and the findings aren’t
live yet. But I’ve looked at some of the preliminary data and as we ask them
how important this is as a focus area, it was actually higher than we expected
and pretty equal to enabling flexibility and cutting back on costs. So
definitely a priority area for them. … 

The new Concur Travel does provide new and better
opportunities to achieve point-of-sale differentiation there. We’ve done an
integration with Thrust Carbon. So travelers who are using the new Concur
Travel can actually make decisions looking at emissions across air, rail, car
[and] hotels. They can see specific attributes on electric vehicle options, on
hybrids, on charging stations, sustainability labels. They can filter for
sustainable options. 

BTN: Are there any planned enhancements or innovations around the data
or reporting piece? 

Sultan: This is one of the areas that as we start talking about the
benefits of having a truly integrated travel and expense ecosystem, I could see
a lot of uses. The brainstorms we’re having [now at Concur] are about how do we
use the data of what you’re expensing, where you’re expensing, because as
opposed to just raw travel reporting, which may include what flights you booked
or what hotels you have, we actually have access [to see] where you’re taking
Ubers, how far you’re taking your taxis, and that data will come from the expense
report. 

We should be able to utilize that data, combine it with
some of our AI processes to actually impact the point-of-sale displays. Maybe
at some point in the future we will be able to tell you a little bit more—if your
company has set a budget or if your company has some [emissions] objectives—we
can have a pretty accurate view for what [a traveler or the] company has done
so far [in terms of emissions], and we can help steer you to some of the better
options for sustainability. So there’s a lot yet to come. 

We’re talking a lot to customers. We’re getting their
ideas, understanding their needs and we have a lot of different things coming
that we’ll start putting on the roadmap probably for early next year or mid
next year.

BTN: Charlie, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. It’s
been a pleasure, and you entertained a few more than five questions, but that
was great. 

Sultan: I always appreciate chance to talk to you about the new
Concur Travel, TripLink and integrated travel and expense.