Concur to Launch Revamped Booking Tool in Q4 through Sabre Integration
SAP Concur’s new complete booking experience for air, hotel and car rental will make its debut in coming months on the Sabre global distribution system for U.S. point-of-sale users, the company announced.
The overhauled booking tool provides a consolidated view that includes New Distribution Capability content, more detailed images and descriptions and clearly visible costs and sustainability information—provided by data from multiple sources, including GDS content and Concur’s partnerships with both Thrust Carbon and Chooose—in what Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan called a “consumer-grade experience.” Highlights include the ability to “narrow down your results a lot quicker using filtering capabilities,” including filtering and sorting for sustainability attributes, he said.
Search capabilities can bring together options for multiple locations, such as airports, city centers and corporate locations. The booking experience also has parity between desktop and mobile experiences for most tasks, according to Sultan.
“The only place where there may not be that parity is in things that aren’t done very frequently,” Sultan said. “If a travel manager goes into configure settings once a year or once a quarter, that functionality might not be migrated to mobile, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense prioritizing it.”
Delta Air Lines, which previously was critical of the legacy Concur tool and its ability to display the carrier’s products and bundles, worked closely with Concur on the overhaul.
“Having a very collaborative approach got us to this point, and we’re very excited about the design being launched,” Delta EVP of sales Steve Sear said. “The new displays are going to be a game changer in terms of what the customers experience.”
Concur has been developing its new booking experiences in phases, with the car rental interface already available in Amadeus, where Concur “had some unique cases there we were trying to solve for,” Sultan said. “We’ve since pivoted to making sure all the verticals are available in Sabre.”
That will happen for U.S. point of sale starting in the fourth quarter, according to Concur. Only customers with travel management companies ready to migrate to the new tool will move to it, and Concur said it would continue to support those who are not on the new tool until they are ready.
In terms of TMC readiness, there are needs both for the “raw transition” that “we are not anticipating will be a heavy lift,” Sultan said. Layering in NDC content is an additional complexity, but the “vast majority” of TMCs already have received the necessary documentation and are engaged with the transition.
“They are very anxious to get the new product working,” he said.
Next year, the new booking experience will be made available through both Amadeus and Travelport Plus, according to Concur. The Travelport connection will include support for both NDC and legacy EDIFACT content as well as hotel and car rental content and services in Travelport Plus.
Michael B. Baker www.businesstravelnews.com