Following the successful launch of the new Concur Travel, we are continuing to take feedback from clients and our TMC partners. We’ve made hundreds of enhancements and refinements in the last 12 months and our innovation continues at pace.

We were the first corporate travel tool to adopt the new Deutsche Bahn API and migrated all customers to that new experience within a month of initial launch. Our first-to-market Ryanair direct connect will be live at the end of October.

Between GDS, Direct Connects, and TripLink, we continue to give our customers the tools they need to obtain the content they want, wherever they want.

Our industry is full of acronyms, standards and complexities that can easily confuse. But cut through this and there is one simple requirement: to get the right content to your travellers on consumer grade technology that they want to use. Don’t be fooled by the people who are making it seem more complex.

I have the utmost respect for the tech start-ups coming into our industry, who were going to eliminate the TMC, but it’s interesting to see that a number of them have ended up buying TMCs, and most of them have at least contracted with TMCs – reverting back to the traditional model. With the current consolidation – and I predict there’s more to come – you’ll be seeing more changes of ownership.

Alongside this, we’re now seeing some of the mega TMCs start to segment into different sectors – SMEs or enterprise – and offering different types of content to each one, plus different ways to fulfil the booking and different service levels.

“Simply put, we are a smorgasbord of content and it’s up to you to pick and choose what works for you and your travellers”

At SAP Concur, we will go direct to suppliers where it adds value to you, not just to make ‘marketing noise’. Unlike others, SAP Concur is not owned by a GDS, or a TMC. We are a pure SaaS provider, multi-channel and completely agnostic, focused on delivering a user experience that impresses travel managers and travellers alike.

We work with over 600 TMCs and provide content from 400-plus airlines via multiple channels. We’re also taking accommodation content from a significant number of TMCs and aggregators, which allows for more hotel choice and rate types for your users.

We can get content from multiple channels of distribution, whether it’s GDS, through your TMC, NDC, or direct connect, as with our recent partnership with Ryanair. We make the same revenue from a £10 rail ticket as we do from a £20,000 flight, so economics don’t affect what we recommend. Nor do we train our AI to influence our recommendations.

Direct connects are not a new innovation. We have been enabling direct connects for over 20 years, but also work with all three of the major GDS companies.

We can take content from anywhere, so if an airline falls out with a GDS, it doesn’t matter – we have other channels where content can be sourced. NDC to us is just another content source. It’s not a big issue.

Simply put, we are a smorgasbord of content and it’s up to you to pick and choose what works for you and your travellers. If you are not getting the content you want from your travel ecosystem, just ask for it.

We believe that tech providers should be the ones removing the complex tasks and making it easy. Using the well-known analogy, it’s up to us as technology providers to be doing all the paddling underneath the surface, taking care of everything, and all that you should see is the swan gliding serenely above water.

Paul Dear is the VP Global Supplier Strategy for EMEA at SAP Concur. He is responsible for ensuring successful travel supplier partnerships for Concur Travel and Concur TripLink solutions. Prior to joining SAP Concur, he was at HRG where he led the strategy for travel suppliers and trade organisations.