Originally Posted by
Baze
My company also uses Concur with Balboa. We are required to use this system. I don't see us doing what your company is doing for a couple reasons.
1. As we all go through one portal it is easy to track corporate bookings to see if meeting targets for discounts.
2. As we are required to book cheapest flight within a tolerance, booking direct on UA would eliminate the comparison to other airlines and would raise costs because if another airline is significantly cheaper, on UA would not see that.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. We use Concur as well, for all of the reasons you list. And Concur isn't going away. Tickets purchased on United.com are supposed to show up in Concur (the sign up process involved linking my Concur account to my United account).
I can't imagine that our travel management group didn't think of the fact that we wouldn't be able to see fares on other airlines. And I'm guessing that United.com isn't suddenly going to start showing competing flights. So somehow this still made enough business sense to justify a pilot.