United Expands Travel Agency Mid-Office Data Feeds

United Airlines will offer data feeds to the Concur Compleat and Cornerstone travel agency mid-office systems to aid reporting for changed corporate bookings, according to the airline's website. Feeds for either mid-office system require enrollment and licensing. The Compleat feed is available now, and the airline expects the Cornerstone feed to be available in the first quarter of 2024.

Concur Compleat and Cornerstone "both are pretty far down the road on how they will take this feed from us and incorporate it into the agency back office for purposes of reporting," United VP of sales strategy and effectiveness Glenn Hollister told BTN.

The moves are in response to corporate buyer and travel management company feedback about their lack of visibility into bookings made on corporate online booking tools or through TMCs but changed by travelers on United's website or mobile app, according to a letter from United SVP of worldwide sales Doreen Burse sent Wednesday morning to corporate customers. 

When that happens, those tickets lose "most, or all negotiated benefits, including discounts, corporate preferred considerations, duty of care visibility and more—until now," Burse wrote, who added that all contracted corporate customers can bring United's direct channels into their managed travel programs.

United sees an average of 10,758 corporate-coded tickets a day changed on either United's dot-com site or its mobile app, Hollister said. "We think we [now] have the full set of functionality needed for these bookings to stay in the managed travel program," he added.

In addition to Concur Compleat and Cornerstone, United offers free duty-of-care integrations to International SOS, Crisis24, GardaWorld, WorldAware and iJet, according to the carrier. It also offers integrations to several expense and reporting tools: SAP Concur Expense, Certify, Chrome River, Emburse, Expensify, Traverse and Traxo.