Concur's a business travel platform. These differ from consumer platforms in a few ways:
1. Private negotiated rates - medium-large companies have bulk rate discounts individually negotiated with various chains that can be integrated into the search flow.
2. Policy management - rules like C-level staff can fly business class, or regular employees may fly premium economy for flights over X hours, etc.
3. Expense report integration.
These things are important enough that most large companies are willing to subject their employees to a subpar travel search experience to get this. (I work for a Concur competitor but freely admit that our search experience is also subpar compared to consumer sites).
We used it once at one of my previous employers. It was used for creating and approving expense reports for travel, with various elaborate options for approval flow and documentation.
Because they don’t have real competition and what it does do (corporate travel management) it actually does well (in the backend). It’s front end and mobile app are pretty shit, however.
It does have some competition when it comes to expenses: Expensify, Netsuite, Salesforce and homegrown stuff come into mind.
It's perfect enterprise software. It meets the legal requirements and integrates with things like nesuite or peoplesoft. Whether it's easy to use or not is inconsequential.
In my experience, it was always trash. I’ve had to use it at every company I’ve ever worked at and it has never been good. At one company, the rule restrictions were so onerous that that and the UX made booking travel so appalling, I paid my own way more than once and then fought for a reimbursement rather than using it.
I travel pretty frequently so I often just call American Express (who acts as a Concur reseller for my company) directly to do the corporate bookings rather than futzing with Concur. I usually find the route I want ahead and then call Amex to price it out/book it. American Express is great — tho my company is big enough to have dedicated CSRs for our account, which helps. Concur is just frustrating.
That said, I will say that the worst parts of Concur are usually employer-made decisions. If your employer has really restrictive travel policies, that makes the Concur experience even worse. For instance, I’ve had the system insist I book an indirect flight that costs more than a direct because of how something is coded, with no way to override. My current employer has very decent travel policies so that’s not an issue, but if it is, it makes the terrible UX and bad search even worse.
I think it's gotten better actually. The jurassic version we had to use at megacorp back in 2014/15 was the only reason I had a windows VM installed. Whatever newer version was deployed a few years later was actually almost usable.
And, yeah, if I did more traveling I'd probably just call up our travel agent. But I'd still be on the hook for cash expenses.
Yeah, Amex Travel is a reseller. I’m not sure if the backend the Amex Travel people see is the same as what we see as end users or if they have a different interface, but at my company, I call a number for Amex travel and speak to someone there, even for bookings made using Concur.
