Innovation Worth Celebrating

At SAP Concur, we are passionate about providing our customers and partners powerful and innovative solutions, which is why we are honored to share that for the seventh year in a row and ninth time in 11 years, SAP Concur has been named the ‘Most Admired Technology Company’ in the business travel industry by The Beat’s Readers’ Choice Awards.

Awarded at The Beat Live conference in Atlanta, GA, the awards were based on a poll conducted this summer that asked readers to choose the brand of their choice in six supplier categories (Airline, Hotel, Car Rental, Travel Management Company, Travel Technology, Payment System) that they "most admire for its policies, management style and service for business clients.”

We strive to build a culture of innovation, collaboration, values and talent at SAP Concur and we’ve had an exciting year in partnership with our more than 43,000 customers and partners. Here’s a few of our favorite advances from the last year:

• Doubling down on traveler safety with expanded Concur Locate capabilities: Expanding on existing Concur Locate technology, we announced several updates to our traveler safety suite of solutions that reinforce SAP Concur’s status as the industry’s most comprehensive traveler safety solution provider. Some of these updates include: expanded employee location dataset including Uber for Business, building on current feeds such as Concur Travel and Expense, supplier e-receipts, and more; more visibility into out-of-channel bookings as TripLink continues to grow; and new messaging capabilities with SAP Concur mobile app integration. In addition, TripIt Pro, part of our TripLink offering, now provides safety scores for neighborhoods around the world, along with important international information like embassy information, currency conversions, vaccinations, and more for 180 countries.
• Leading the charge as the only corporate travel solution with embedded Airbnb listings: The growth of Airbnb expenses within SAP Concur, along with regular conversations with customers and travel managers, led us to the introduction of Airbnb listings directly within Concur Travel. As the only corporate travel solution with Airbnb listings embedded directly in the online booking tool, SAP Concur clients can now seamlessly search for and view Airbnb listings alongside hotels.
• Embracing innovation with Concur Travel and Expense bots: In response to an increased desire for digital assistants in the workplace, we partnered with Slack to deliver the first bots that allow users to search, book, share and expense business travel, right from Slack. It’s all about simplicity and ease of use with the Concur Travel and Expense bots on Slack. The result is a better user experience and more choices for travelers, improved visibility and control for travel managers, and simplified expense reporting.
• Helping budget owners effectively manage resources and make better business decisions: This year we launched Budget, a new solution that makes budget data visible, near real-time, and actionable. Budget synthesizes data from SAP Concur solutions including Expense, Invoice, Purchase and Travel Request, creating a comprehensive dashboard for spend – before and after it occurs. This allows finance leaders, sales leaders and project managers to see spending events unfold, and helps employees make better decisions, ultimately leading to better overall financials and a stronger bottom line.

As we more deeply integrate between SAP and SAP Concur, these innovations are part of our commitment to helping our customers save time, more effectively manage spend, and protect their employees – a mission we look forward to expanding on further in the coming year, and beyond. Thank you, as always, for your continued support.

Tim MacDonald​ leads the company’s T&E Cloud initiatives such as fostering an ecosystem of partners to create value for clients, their employees and the travel suppliers who support them as well as developing Concur's data science capability and product offering. Mr. MacDonald’s travel industry experience prior to Concur includes senior vice president & general manager of Expedia US, chairman and president of luxury travel provider Classic Vacations and vice president of product management at Hotwire.