Concur Car Rental Booking Tool to Include Sustainability Features

SAP Concur's new car rental booking tool, slated for release by year-end, will feature tools to help travelers make more sustainable transportation choices, Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan said in a memo released today.

Features of the upgraded tool will include search filter capabilities for hybrid and electric vehicles as well as guidance on vehicle emissions to give travelers more control over the environmental impact of their trip, Sultan said. Adding the capabilities coincides with results of SAP Concur's recent Global Business Travel Survey of 3,850 business travelers, which showed 94 percent said they planned to take steps over the next year to reduce the environmental impact of their travel.

The new tool also will drive "process efficiencies through improved error avoidance while adding new ways to explore car rental options across suppliers both on-airport and off-airport," Sultan said.

The new car rental booking experience is part of full re-platforming of Concur Travel, for which Concur has hired more than 200 engineers and product managers, Sultan said. He called it "one of the most significant development investments ever made in the history of SAP Concur."

Concur launched a new rail experience last year, and the car rental experience will be followed by a hotel booking experience in early 2023 that will include "an enhanced [user experience] with features including better imagery and upgraded filtering and sorting capabilities," Sultan said. The airline booking component will arrive by next summer's Global Business Travel Association Convention, with "a revamped user experience, enhanced content and a better ability for travelers to compare amenities across products," he said.

Sultan added that the re-platforming work goes beyond the booking tool.

"We are building the travel platform of the future, across all travel products and partners," Sultan said. "It’s built from scratch using the latest in microservices technology, which allows Concur Travel to be even more scalable, reliable and flexible. It enables us to efficiently deploy innovative features, launch the SAP Concur suite of travel products into the next generation, and deliver a streamlined ecosystem and platform that will enable an integrated, end-to-end travel experience regardless of whether users are on desktop or mobile."