SAP Concur's Paul Dear talks:
- SAP Concur's rail investment
- Journey stitching
- Improving traveler duty of care
SAP's Concur Travel for the past two years has been "heavily investing" in its rail platform, adding new rail operators, particularly in Europe, to help corporate customers capture rail transactions.
The ramp-up started in earnest when some countries began to limit certain domestic flights – such as in France, which in May 2023 enacted a ban on short-haul flights that could be replaced by train travel to cut carbon emissions.
BTN senior editor Donna M. Airoldi spoke with VP of Concur Travel EMEA Paul Dear in August at the Global Business Travel Association convention in Chicago and in early September about the platform progress the company is making. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
BTN: What was the impetus for investing in the rail platform?
Paul Dear: There were [8.3] billion rail transactions in Europe in 2024, according to the European Union, and [according to Concur] 20 per cent of those were for business. We're talking nearly 2 billion rail tickets. No online booking tool has even a fraction of that, so this is a huge runway of transactions that are left outside of the booking tool. We decided to do three things.
Most people can book domestic tickets – an American can book an Amtrak transaction, a person in the UK can book a UK rail ticket. Domestic is a given. After that, inbound is the next big thing. … What we built is [the ability for] domestic, inbound travel and journey stitching.
If you're French and you're flying into Madrid, you can pre-book a Renfe ticket or an Iryo ticket and go to your destination. A UK traveller coming into the US now can pre-book their rail ticket in Concur for Amtrak. … Once you've built that, the next stage is journey stitching.
BTN: What is journey stitching?
Dear: Imagine you are in Lyon and you want to go to Rome. At the moment, it's flight only [in the Concur app]. But we're going live with [France's] SNCF [in early September]. … We've now built the connections that allow for an SNCF ticket and a Trenitalia ticket to be booked in the same booking. That is how you get the journey stitched. You can now have a true comparison between rail and short-haul air. The tool we built allows us to integrate the rail carriers with one booking.
BTN: That also helps with carbon emission reporting.
Dear: Yes. Travel managers are saying to us in Europe, now you have to report your CO2 emissions. … How many transactions? What were the CO2 emissions? The more rail transactions they can get into the booking tool, or to the travel management company, allows the average to fall because most rail bookings are booked directly with the [supplier]. … We've given them a chance to book short-haul European rail, irrelevant of borders, as we build out the platform, inbound and domestic. The platform is built and now we're adding more and more carriers to that so it interlinks.
BTN: Which rail providers are on the Concur platform currently?
Dear: We have Renfe and Iryo in Spain. You can go use one provider between Madrid and Barcelona and back with the other. SNCF in France. ÖBB in Austria is testing and will be live [in September]. SBB in Switzerland. Deutsche Bahn [in Germany]. We have UK Rail, which also includes split ticketing, which is specific to the UK. If you break up your journey, two tickets might be cheaper than one. It's important for UK corporate travellers. We've got Eurostar. We're launching Trenitalia in Q3, then it will go to general release at the end of the year.
Then we're looking into Benelux, which is the Netherlands, Luxembourg [and Belgium]. Also Swedish rail. … In the coming six to 12 months, we'll have an opportunity to add more content in. … And we're seeing an uplift in rail tickets being booked through recognised channels.
BTN: Are you in discussions with any other countries' rail operators?
Dear: [Concur] also is in discussions with Japan, [where] there's three main rail carriers. They've all got different forms of payment, different ways that they work. … We're looking at Australia. … We work closely with our partner in China as well for the high-speed trains there. … Nothing is confirmed. … Another unexplored area is India, which has announced a high-speed rail network. … But we'll complete Europe first. We also work with Amtrak, and we do have TripLink for Amtrak.
BTN: Can you explain split ticketing in the UK?
Dear: In the UK, there are many franchised rail companies, and you can go from one rail company to another on the same track. If I was going from Bristol to London, it might be one price. But if I go Bristol to Swindon and Swindon to London, because it's two different rail carriers, it may be cheaper to split the ticket. What we are seeing is significant [potential] savings where a split ticket is available, upward of 20 per cent savings. … Those sorts of numbers are quite significant, especially when you're talking about millions of pounds worth of rail potentially going through the online booking tool.
BTN: When did the split ticketing become available?
Dear: In June.
BTN: What numbers can you share about booking growth?
Dear: We saw a doubling of transactions in the UK with the new platform. Rail transactions run into the millions globally. I can't give specific numbers. … We had seen [the transactions] only on the expense tool. There was leakage out of policy. We're bringing it back into the tool.
If you take our expenses, about 90 per cent of air gets booked through the recognised channel. You get 40 per cent to 50 per cent of hotels. And then you get about 20 per cent of rail. Normally, the long-haul rail gets booked in the tool of the TMC, but 80 per cent of those tickets are outside. Duty of care is missed. CO2 emissions reporting is missed. Then you can get rail tickets that [previously couldn't] be booked, such as Paris to Zurich. Now they can be booked with us.
BTN: When did you start this project?
Dear: It's probably taken 18 months to get to this point. We work with a partner called Trainline in Europe that allows us to do the journey stitching and international inbound rail… through the travel booking tool. But the true journey stitching in Europe, we needed a partner to work with that allows for that interconnectivity. Now it's about embedding it within our travel management companies.
BTN: Which customers are your heavy users?
Dear: Customers all over have been asking for it, global companies with offices all over Europe. … Everyone likes to talk about the CO2 emissions, but it really does still come out to cost savings. We're pleased we made the investment. There's cost savings, there's CO2 savings, there's duty of care because we can track it.
One case study is the consulting firms. They charge by the hour for services. If at an airport lounge, on the plane, in a taxi, that's not chargeable. But a three-to-four-hour rail journey, those are chargeable hours.
BTN: How much has SAP Concur invested?
Dear: It was north of US$10 million. … It's significant. We stepped up, and I think that's the key.