American Express Global Business Travel and SAP Concur last month announced their new “strategic alliance”, and with it the launch of an integrated travel and expense platform, called Complete.
Reactions from corporate travel professionals came in thick and fast following the 4 October announcement, with many speculating how the marriage of two industry giants will affect corporate buyers and their travellers. Several weeks later, buyers still have questions.
BTN Europe sat down with Concur Travel at the GBTA Europe Conference in Hamburg this week to seek some answers.
The biggest “misconception” among buyers, according to Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan, is that investment in its new Concur Travel booking tool – commonly referred to as T2 – will cease and all efforts will be focused on the new Complete platform, leaving those customers that are not Amex GBT customers with a potentially inferior product.
“New Concur Travel is the foundation underlying the Complete offering, so we have to continue to invest in Concur Travel. The Complete product will not work if the new Concur Travel does not work,” he said.
“There’s incremental resources from us and GBT to work on Complete, but the resource that has been working on new Concur Travel will continue to work on new Concur Travel because we need that to work.”
Sultan said there is an “augmented team” working on Complete, and that the respective development teams behind T2 and Complete will need to “talk and connect”.
“It’s very important to us that new Concur Travel continues to be innovative. We still have a [development] roadmap, you can still see the innovation, and we’ve released a tonne of new features,” he said. “The new Concur Travel roadmap covers what is happening to the core product and then there will be another roadmap on top of that [for Complete].” The latter will include quarterly updates on new features and functionality, but Sultan would not disclose further details.
“Since the deal was just announced, there’s still a lot of work being done to figure out the timing,” he said.
Chief among T2’s latest enhancements, meanwhile, is the ability to book cross-border rail journeys on multiple European rail operators under a single ticket. This rail “journey stitching” will go live in the Spanish market next week, with rail operators Renfe and Iryo. Eurostar will follow in December, along with France’s SNCF in Q1 2026 and Trenitalia in Q2.
“We’ve done all the domestic and international licensing work behind the scenes to bring this to the market,” said Concur Travel vice president Paul Dear. “We have [API] feeds coming in for content, but the journey ‘stitching’ comes from us… [that will allow users to make] one booking on multiple carriers, stitched together in Concur Travel, with all the CO2 emissions reporting following it.”
This update, as well as all future updates – including a new set of AI agents within Concur’s Travel and Expense tools – and everything else currently available in T2 will be simultaneously rolled out on Complete.
“We’re seeing this as a positive for the industry because we’re releasing [updates] at the same time,” Dear explained. “What this does is encourage other TMCs to move more quickly because you’ve got one [Amex GBT] implementing slightly quicker, and everyone else will want to catch-up,” he said.
Sultan confirmed, however, that Complete will have some additional exclusive features co-developed with Amex GBT. This includes a chat-based AI agent that can be used to make a booking or service changes. This will be automated by Amex GBT, Sultan said, based on the top 25 most commonly asked traveller queries. If a query is “too complicated” for the AI agent, Sultan said it will default to a human agent who will receive an AI-produced summary of the traveller enquiry, “so, it will be a nice warm hand off”.
In a session at the GBTA Europe Conference, Amex GBT executive vice president, global SME, Jason Geall, said Complete will also include “compelling supplier offers”. Geall pointed to an impending announcement from Hilton, which he said will offer a Hilton Honors membership programme for Complete users that will be “knock-out", adding “we’re hoping that will signal the start of a number of supplier offers that we expect to see in the coming months.”
Paul Abbott, CEO of Amex GBT, during a Q3 earnings call on Monday (10 November) said the new Complete platform would give it a “competitive advantage” and help to “accelerate” growth.
“What’s different about this is that we’re now actually co-developing a new flagship solution that will lead the industry for travel and expense. We have teams that are working together to fully integrate the solutions,” he added.
“That is going to mean improved content for customers and improved savings for customers, and it’s without question going to be an improved experience… That experience will be AI-powered. There will be one app essentially for everything.”
Abbott said that the new Complete platform would help Amex GBT to target existing SAP customers around the world.
“Eighty per cent of the SAP customer base are SME customers that have over 100 million users,” he explained. “With this new flagship solution, we have the ability to market that solution into the SAP customer base, which is a very, very large [and] established SME customer base.”
Sultan confirmed the rollout of Complete has already begun, with the new mobile app and desktop version of the platform now live in regions where Amex GBT has a large clientbase. This includes the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, among others.
He said “several hundred” mutual customers have already migrated to the new platform, with more queued up to make the transition later this month.
Following the prolonged and reportedly arduous rollout of T2, Sultan said some customers had expressed concerns about the transition to Complete.
“As we were migrating people to new Concur Travel there were certainly some cases of features that were not planned to move, or features that were not quite available yet, and that created some of the pain points, but the beautiful thing about Complete is that it will benefit from everything Concur Travel has. People won’t lose any features migrating to Complete. They will only gain features,” he said.
Data sharing with Amex GBT was another area of concern, but Sultan stressed that “no client data will be shared without approval” and “they have full control over that”.
“Once [clients] understand and recognise they are the ones in control, generally the feedback is very positive. They’ve been asking us for years for a more integrated, unified solution, and [asking] 'can you innovate faster?' This will allow us to do those things,” he said.
As for changes to its TMC partner programme, which is expected to be “fundamentally different” when it comes into effect in January 2026, Sultan said “tiers and benefits are changing but the ability to service and sell Concur Travel is unchanged.”
Geall too said Amex GBT will continue to maintain “very strong relationships” with other OBT providers “because they’re an important part of our offering and will continue to be so, and that’s proportionally invested in”.