Travel and Expense
One Year In: The Strategic Alliance Between SAP Concur and Amex GBT Hits Its Stride
A year ago, we announced our strategic alliance with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) with a simple but ambitious goal: make business travel less fragmented and address friction points for our joint customers.
Customers consistently told us that they wanted a more connected experience across travel, expense, payments, and servicing without having to manage all of those connections themselves. With T&E remaining the second-largest controllable cost for most companies, that fragmentation is a real drag on time, visibility and value. We knew that bringing together SAP Concur’s travel and expense capabilities with Amex GBT’s marketplace and servicing expertise would help solve that problem.
One year later, we are proud of how far we’ve come. Teams across SAP Concur and Amex GBT have been working side by side against a shared roadmap to turn that ambition into reality. Today, more than 80% of our joint customers – thousands of organizations – are live with Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT, on a single joint app with a consistent traveler experience. And we’re continuing to build on that momentum.
From vision to execution
In our first year together, we have created a more connected and seamless experience for both travelers and travel managers.
Travelers can increasingly book, get support when plans change, access benefits, and manage expenses through a more coordinated experience, while travel managers gain better visibility into bookings, spend, and program performance.
We’ve built a strong foundation over the past year. At SAP Concur Fusion in March, we shared some of the first major signs of that progress, including:
- An enterprise integrated chat platform with automated hand-off to a live travel counselor
- Layering AI into the chat experience
- An expanded Amex GBT marketplace within Complete, including access to more than 80 rail providers
- Quadrupled NDC carriers, moving us toward a unified modern retailing approach across the ecosystem
- The Travel Manager homepage brings tools, reporting and program insights together, giving travel managers a more connected view across online and offline activity
We also expanded what the alliance can offer beyond Complete. The Egencia and Concur Expense integration became generally available this year, allowing booking information to flow automatically into expense and reducing the manual work travelers have to do after a trip.
By GBTA Convention in August – just a few months later – another wave of progress enabled us to show how that foundation is translating into new, better experiences for travelers and travel managers with:
- Leakage reporting that combines travel and expense data, including offline bookings, to give travel managers a comprehensive view of spend by business unit, category, vendor, and traveler
- Perks which brings supplier offers, corporate benefits and loyalty entitlements directly into the booking experience and applies automatically at point of sale
- Travel disruption management for air that brings alerts, self-service rebooking, and live support together when plans change – applying airline waivers automatically, so nothing gets left on the table
Different capabilities, but the same underlying idea: travelers and travel managers shouldn’t have to manage the fragmentation that has historically existed across business travel.
Building for the long term
One of the biggest takeaways from our first year is the value of bringing together two of the industry’s leaders. By looking across the entire travel journey, from shopping and booking to servicing, program management, and expense, we’re identifying new opportunities to reduce friction and create more value for customers. That shared perspective continues to shape the roadmap ahead.
"The strategic alliance has unlocked the ability for us to co-develop the roadmap to deeply build Amex GBT's capabilities, into the SAP Concur ecosystem,” said Evan Konwiser, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Amex GBT. “Our joint clients told us they wanted a unified UX, a more integrated experience, more innovation, and increased speed of delivery, and we are doing all of that. The foundations are built, thousands of clients are starting to see the benefits, and we are piloting the roll out of new features and experiences together.”
We're proud of what we've accomplished, but we know there's a lot more opportunity out there. Now that the foundation is in place, we're accelerating into year two.
Accelerating into year two
A year ago, we talked about the experience we wanted to create. Today, we can point to more than 80% of joint customers live on Complete, multiple product waves shipped in a single year, teams co-developing against a shared roadmap, and new capabilities reaching more parts of the travel journey.
As we enter year two, we’re not slowing down. We’ll continue innovating across the Amex GBT marketplace, our joint software and services, with AI at the core. The goal remains to make travel easier for employees, give travel managers greater visibility and control, and help organizations get more value from their travel programs.
One year in, we’ve moved from ambition to execution at a pace most alliances take years to reach. Now it’s about building on that progress.
