Concur executive VP Tim McDonald unveiled “surprising” research showing 39 per cent of UK business travellers have booked directly with a supplier in the past year.
The research, conducted with the GBTA Foundation, polled more than 750 business travellers in France, Germany and the UK.
It found that across these countries, 62-84 per cent of travellers said direct bookings are allowed in certain situations, while 29-52 percent said they were allowed in ‘many’ or ‘all’ circumstances.
Speaking at the GBTA conference in Frankfurt, McDonald said he believed that regardless of improvements to policies and corporate booking tools, “there will always be exception-based direct supplier booking”, and that “the future demands” travel and expense platforms that are fully integrated with all channels and service providers.
Concur recently signed a deal with Booking.com that makes the online travel agency’s 800,000-plus properties available on the Concur platform.
Hotel booking firm HRS also revealed GBTA Foundation-partnered research, which showed traditional processing of expense reports costs a business €53 per transaction on average.
HRS vice-president Jason Long pointed out that a company averaging 20,000 expense transactions a year spends more than €1 million in resources such as man-hours, plus another €178,000 correcting errors on expense reports – the study found that 19 per cent of claims contain errors.
GBTA Foundation vice-president Joseph Bates said electronic, automated expense reporting “reduces margins of error and increases indirect savings.”