When Concur unveiled the extension of ground transportation via GroundScope to Europe this week inevitable talk around its Perfect Trip initiative ensued.
The project is certainly ideological and a vision in terms of a 'seamless and ultimately touchless trip for the traveller' but there are some interesting internal projects going on to plug some of the gaps in the experience.
Coming this year and already being piloted is a voice search via Concur's investment in Evature. The system will be multi-lingual and aims to replace text-based search with voice.
A further project is 'open booking' and currently focusing on the hotel space because of the amount of policy leakage in the area. The aim is to move away from mandating and allow travellers a more 'best buy' approach while still enabling the company to capture the necessary reporting and security data.
The development enables travellers to book on a hotel's website but link activity to their Concur account and discussions with major hotel chains in the US are ongoing.
Pierre-Emmanuel Tetaz, Concur's vice president of business development says:
"For some customers up to 50% of hotels booked are outside the corporate programme, travellers have found more convenient venues at a cheaper price so the stick approach is not working that well.
"When you book on the supplier website because you prefer the experience or you get better rates, you'll be able to make the link in the system and bring back all your itineraries and bookings that happened outside the travel management company and traditional channels."
Travellers will either be asked to link their hotelbrand.com account to their Concur account or a hotel account will be automatically generated for them.
But, is it in the hotels' interest to play ball when they're getting the bookings direct to hotelbrand.com? Tetaz argues that it is because they're getting the most accurate profile information as well as potentially getting access to new customers.
Open booking might be sounding a bit Google-esque - the search giant has received many business travel column inches for its travel policy which essentially sets price thresholds and rewards travellers with half the money back to go towards future trips, where savings are made. Also, hardly surprising when Google is a Concur customer.
The travel and expense specialist plans to introduce a 'Google-type' tech feature this year enabling companies to set a benchmark for a hotel price.
"It's giving back more flexibility at the traveller level and enabling them to manage the travel budget, another step in the direction towards the perfect trip.
"The TripIt acquisition was the first step in developing a set of tools that specifically targets the end user in order to make his life easier but also meet the needs of the corporate and suppliers. It's no longer an option that this to be a nightmare. We're entering a world where travellers will have increased buying power."
One further initiative is around making the move from big data to 'my data' and using all the bookings and expense information Concur has on its travellers to be more predictive. For example, if a traveller stayed in a Hilton for the last 20 trips, then there's little point in presenting them with a choice of 50 hotels.
Evolution of the Perfect Trip
NB: Virtual image via Shutterstock