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.”