Item: SAP Concur
Rating: 8
Author: Patrick Reilly, CMP

Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Concur Travel is being used by my whole organization with the primary use being by my meetings department. We use it to book all staff, speakers, and board travel. It helps us save money on group bookings as well as reduced travel agent fees. We don't use much of the expense features, just mainly the travel, hotel, and rental car booking features. It helps our company save time and money by not having to price hunt for flights or hotels.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Flights can be put on hold for 24 hours to gain approval before purchase.
Price comparisons are shown all on one diagram to get the best price/schedule.
More than one party can be copied on itineraries (helpful for those who want admins copied)

Cons

If a flight is on hold, before purchasing, if you want to add a traveler reward number or TSA precheck number, you have to cancel the whole flight and book again. Would be easier to allow those edits all the way up till purchase.
Sometimes they charge random support fees and don't offer an invoice for them so you have to track them down with their accounting department.

Return on Investment

Reduced booking fee from $25 to just $5 per transaction, saving us a lot of money.
Allows for all aspects of a trip to be booking on one reservation saving individual traveler time.

Alternatives Considered

I honestly have not worked with other travel and expense management products. I have to answer N/A for this question.

Likelihood to Recommend

Concur is a great tool for small businesses to control their travel costs. It's a one-stop-shop for all flights, hotels, and rental cars at negotiated prices. It allows for you to connect a business reward account to all bookings so your organization gets a reward incentive as well as the traveler on all paid for and flown flights. It's not ideal when you have a lot of non-regular travelers. With regular travelers, you can create profiles and expedite the booking process. With one-off speakers or temporary employees, you have to enter everything manually each time if a profile is not created for them.

SAP Concur Attributes

Key Insights

Do you think SAP Concur delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP Concur's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP Concur live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP Concur go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAP Concur again?

Yes

Usability

I would give Concur Travel and Expense a 7 overall as it only becomes user friendly after you have been working in it awhile. There are a lot of little secondary features (especially in the travel portion) that can go unnoticed when you are just starting out. For instance, you can sign your company up for Business airline rewards like Delta Skybonus and have that included on all the Delta flights you book. However, this feature is not advertised and takes QUITE a bit of run-around in order to get it added to your account if you didn't do it when you first were setting up your account.

Easy Tasks

Flight selection (comparison grid makes it incredibly simple to find suitable flights)
Reporting Functions to pull company spend.

Difficult Tasks

Setting up Business Reward Accounts so that all flights booked under your account for certain airlines are included.
While a flight is on hold if you want to change any personal flier information you must cancel the whole flight and start again. Before the flight is purchased and on hold you should be able to change name or add TSA pre check etc.

Scalability

I gave it a middle average because at my meetings department is the only one who really uses it at my company. For the sake of uniformity and quality control we do not allow other departments to work in the software. This makes my answer quite limited for this question. From my experience with the programing, it would be very easily scalable throughout our company.

Ease of Integration

Based on my previous answer I will have to give this a median answer as we do not integrate it. There is not a way other to say N/A

Evaluating Concur Travel and Expense and Competitors

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Prior Experience with the Product

The most important factors for us to incorporate Concur into our business was the need to simplify the travel booking process as well as cut expenses. We were paying a travel agency around $25 per booking for each flight, that decreased to only $5 per booking with Concur online tool. Bringing the travel booking process in house and decreasing the service fee by $20 were the main factors.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would have included more software to test. I had worked with Concur at a previous job and was confident in my knowledge of the programming and usage. So, I automatically went right for it when I was tasked with integrating a new travel system at my current job and did not vet other companies against it.

Using Concur Travel and Expense

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using	None

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes, but I don't use it

Comments

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Concur is a meeting planners dream tool for travel.

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