YXXFlyer

I found it very hard to get a day travelling with concur. Its multicity doesn't work the same way as ITAand won't recognize itineraries that could be done on a single fare. I found it very hard to get YYC-YVR-YYZ to meet up with a colleague doing only YVR-YYZ. (routings like that would show up, but often not the exact one I needed).

I find dealing with their call center horrific. Often took ages (longer than AC as E50k) and generally not very competent.

They are horrendous at dealing with the expense side of flight passes. They don't issue an invoice for the full FP and they don't include the value of the FP credit on the individual booking, hence there isn't a single opportunity for you to claim the expense. I prefinance the FP on my personal credit card and expense segment by segment to various clients. I had to revert to printouts of AC FP purchase and individual credit bookings. For a company who's core business model is around expenses, not travel, I found this a fatal mistake and I have very rarely used them since that adventure. I now run my FPs outside concur alltogether.

Contrary to other posters, concur often shows a Sabre price for AC flights that is about 5% less than the direct AC booking (which we also see) so in our case cheaper, not more expensive.

Keeping track of credits is hard to impossible. But if you know you have one, applying one to a new booking on the phone works well, albeit at the increased booking fee. You're on your own to get that sorted on the expense side though, which is great fun if the credit transferred from travel for one client to another client.

I think the system works reasonably well for infrequent travellers that don't know AC's backend, fare constructs, routings, etc very well. If you're not E50k/SE, they'll probably beat AC in taking care of you in irrops (at a higher final cost).

All in all, I think they fail at their core premise of managing the entire expense workflow. Most of my colleagues seem to manage however, so maybe I'm just not a good match.

AtlanticXpat

We (fortunately it seems) don't use Concur for the actual flight booking piece. We do use it to get travel pre-approved & then it routes to our TA via email who contact us to arrange the travel. I usually give the TA the exact flights I want & the class I want to be booked in & fortunately we have some flexibility in that within the x hours economy >x hours business rule.

The actual expense submission part of concur is a bit of a PITA. Scanning or taking pics of umpteen bloody receipts to upload them usually takes me a good few hours at the end of a trip. I suppose I could use the mobile app and do it on the fly but the last concur mobile app I used was for BB10 and wasn't terribly good. Is the iphone app any better?

lostinthewash

We are also forced to use Concur with our corporate travel policy rules built in. It is reasonably easy to game, but you do have to know your own policy, and spend a fair amount of time researching the flights you want on the airline website first. (It is also wise to find out which deviations get logged for reports and which ones don't ... cozy up to your travel/procurement department - they will tell you).

When I asked to book directly with AC, our travel department (based in the US) said we had to use Concur because of the reporting .. "it's important we know who is traveling at any given time because of emergencies blah, blah, blah". Right. Born yesterday.

So, I go to our friendly AC website, find what I want, manipulate my search in Concur to show those flights and triple check that it's not giving me a Tango fare. If the hotels I want aren't "preferred" then I book hotels outside Concur. (Our travel policy restricts reimbursement of airline tickets to those with a Concur itinerary, but they haven't figured out how to do that with hotel charges yet )

YXXFlyer

We don't use it for expenses, but the iPhone app usually doesn't even find flights. I only use it, and rarely at that, to make a quick check on hotels and cars so I know if the corporate rate is available. It's rubbish at non-airport car rentals though (as is the website).

ridefar

iPhone app is great for capturing expense images, and for keeping track of previously booked itineraries, and for approving employee expense reports. It doesn't support approving expense requests (which is a PITA), and is pretty poor for flight bookings. Simple hotel and rental car booking through the app are not bad.

Overall, my experience with expense submission via concur is pretty positive. When used with a corporate credit card, all the charges populate your report automatically. It takes me less than 30 min to blast through 3-4 weeks of expenses, which would typically be 2-3 trips, hotels, meals, taxis, etc.

I don't use it all for flight bookings as I use flight passes, but do submit the expense. As others have mentioned, if you have to use it for flight bookings, and your company has a restrictive set of travel rules, you will end up spending a lot of time gaming the system. Or just being out of policy because a direct flight is $51 more expensive (and your company allows $50 over before being non compliant) and Concur wants you to fly YYC-YWG-YOW-YVR-DEN-SCL-YYZ rather than just YYC-YYZ. Obviously, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but the routings Concur can come up with can be pretty colossally stupid.

Generally online hotel and car booking is very easy.

Often1

There is no Concur "call center". It's just a piece of software.

The place you are calling is your employer's travel department or corporate TA. If they handle calls poorly it's them. Has nothing to do with Concur.

Similarly, employers don't get kickbacks, they get discounts. Who cares? The employer is footing the bill. If you had to pay for your ticket and were not reimbursed, but your employer got the discount, that would be a kickback.

The complaints here are about corporate travel policies, not about the software.

superangrypenguin

Ok, now that I spent yesterday hating Concur, here are a few reasons why I like Concur.

1) Car rentals are easy.
2) Hotels are easy. I know the SPG rate by heart but the other ones I either have to call into get the corporate code or I have to call AMEX business travel (our TA)

Last but not least.

I don't know if this is Concur or AMEX, but if my flight were to ever...not get to its destination or gets there in many pieces with me dead or injured, I do happen to know my manager and all of his peers (so all managers in my org) would end up getting a call and an email that I'm now dead or injured. Chances are they would know ahead of my spouse and then my spouse would hear from them instead of through the news (in a perfect world).

Also, technically speaking we have unlimited health coverage when traveling for business anywhere on the planet (covered by the corporation and not through insurance) - but our trip has to be in Concur. So any rogue travelers = technically could be disqualified from health coverage if they don't use Concur.

Jagboi

Ive found it difficult to get "reasonable" routings with resorting to some creativity. I wanted to go YYC-MUC and it had me wandering all over Europe on Alitalia with long stopovers and TATL on LH.

In the end I removed my AC number, put in my BA FF number and it gave me BA with one stop at LHR at a cheaper cost and a lot fewer hours than the AC/LH/AZ combo. Took a lot of work to get it though.

cruzcap

friends don't let friends book Concur...unless you are your company CFO...terrible system not focused on employees...

mkjr

I don’t have issues with it and despite what people say, I have booked BA via concur and managed to upgrade using my Avios from CW to F directly with the airline…. My experience is also that it has the lowest fares and our discounts with our preferred airlines, not to mention our negotiated hotel rates, are baked into the same. I have never seen a flight at AC.com that is lower than what I see for the same flights in our site although perhaps some don’t have the auto discounts that we do…It used to be Travelocity Business a few years back and I liked TBiz better personally. That said, I have used Concur for some of our offices that don’t use it and booked hotels for them and got better hotel rates than they could through their Amex desk. The search is a little buggy because you have to have use + or – on the time which can be a challenge. Getting cheaper options that have 10-15 hours of lay over can be annoying but thankfully, I am permitted to ignore. Sure, my employer might get kick backs but I can use my own CC to make the bookings and they really bay the bill…so who am I to complain.

I will say it has improved in the last year or so.

YXXFlyer

As I got told off for quoting downsides that are not expense related, all your upsides are travel policy / travel booking related, which are not concur ^. You can continue hating concur without feeling bad

YXXFlyer

The expense submission, which you quote as the biggest upside, is the exact part Concur is NOT used for in our company. So it only shows as a TA (on the backend being handled by TBiz). Given the fact that they fail so miserably at handling FP expenses, I do stick to my position. There are obviously parts of their system that may be working well, which my employer has chosen not to implement..

LockheedElectra

We are forced to use Concur, but in my position I can completely bypass if I want to (and often do). Although it is OK for many flights, here are my main issues:

1. Last second bookings are a nightmare, as it will give you a message that an agent has to issue the ticket. Not good if you are stuck in a city after office hours and are trying to get home (has happened to me several times).
2. Yes, the photo taking of the expenses is nice, but I sometimes have nightmares closing monthly expenses with foreign exchange; if you are a penny out everything goes to crap.
3. It will always try and book Tango, which for me on international flights is a no no as I will want to try and upgrade. This requires a call to Carlson to fix it.
4. As it searches virtually all airlines, it is difficult to wade through a lot of options. I tend to go on the airline site that I want to fly, figure out the flights, and then have my EA book on Concur. I also find the interface a bit clumsy compared to most of the airline web sites, and even Expedia.
5. I have been booking a lot of flights on DL in J where it is just a bit more expensive than Y, and I pay the difference myself. Our company has it set up so that this isn't possible.
6. I use flight passes, and although it says it can handle them, it can't.
7. Finally, choosing seats is virtually impossible most of the time, and of course AC does not interface to it at all, so you need to either call in, or use their booking tool.

Overall, I do not like Concur, but I see why the company wants us to use it.

ridefar

If you are using a company issued cc, this shouldn't be an issue. It isn't for us anyway.

Say you pay 10 USD for something. Charge it on your card, it comes back as a $12 CAD charge on the card and that is what you expense. So you never need to worry about forex fluctuations over the course of your trip, or whatever. Now, I do recall using it before it could import corporate cc transactions easily, and it was a ginormous PITA. And nobody has ever given me grief if I expense that $12 CAD but take a picture of a $10 USD receipt. YMMV by company, but for us, that part is pretty smooth.

Sean Peever

There are two (well multiple but two that count here) levels to Concur.

1) Employee expense reports and reimbursement must be done via concur.

2) All travel booking must be done via Concur.

You as a company can choose to implement just 1 or 2.

By doing just 1, it still let's employees book directly with the airline, or whatever site they want to use, but because all reporting and reimbursement is done it still provides great tracking if expenses.

By doing #2, the only advantage is that the company can enforce policies that they set. The irony of this is that employees just spend tons of time gaming the system to book what they want anyway. - costing you employee time and employee frustration.


I would suggest using just the expense reports and reimbursement features but not implementing the travel booking ones. You then get the same level of tracking without pissing people off and wasting time.