TravelPerk business travel booking - any good with BA?
 

I wanted to pick the community brains. I'm looking to consolidate our company travel booking arrangements and I was wondering if anyone has experience using TravelPerk? At the moment everyone books their own and claims on expenses which is a little difficult to track as easily as I'd like.

I'm asking on here as most of our flying travel is with BA (EU & US) but our employees also spend a lot of time in hotels mostly in the UK.

So good idea, stick with booking direct, or any alternatives that play nice with BA?

Do you know roughly what your spend is, or number of employees?

We have 10 employee that travel, and that's growing. Roughly our spend is just under £100k pa on travel.

Works fine with BA -

I've used before with flights on different airlines and hotels all under one itinerary, and it comes with one trip itinerary and bill. They seem pretty proactive too on the rebooking side during IRROPS.

Since they're also in the SaaS / tech space, I'm very aware of their quick growth. They're actually the fastest growing startup in Europe right now: https://saas1000.com/

Not hard when the competition is Concur. I spent an LHR-ORD flight half watching IFE, and half watching someone try to search and "buy" a transaction on Concur (747 with the wifi enabled).

I'd use TravelPerk for everything it weren't for the lack of trains (coming soon), BA Holidays inventory (which I use to for US trips in the same week), and the ability to earn extra Avios booking direct with holidays.

Correction about trains. We use travelperk successfully, trains used to be a major gap but recently they finally started to offer trains. Fully covering Germany (DB), France, Spain, Italy, Eurostar... You can book from within the platform and see it all in the same invoice which was a big upgrade for us... As far as I checked other tools like Concur and Egencia don't have anything close. Egencia actually redirects you to deutsche bahn making you leave their platform!

You made me laugh with the Concur story :) it's so true! Super clunky and old, employees use it only cause they are being made to not because they want to, that's for sure.

There are still some small gaps in the tool (you mentioned a few) but all and all it's a big upgrade from what you are currently doing and much better than the traditional tools/agencies

hope this helps

Thanks to both of you, useful info

Concur is simply compliance software. It is not a TA, an OTA or anything else. One can set Concur up to permit (or not) pretty much anything that can be booked through a corporate TA. E.g., F, fully-refundable, and so on.

Most people who experience problems with Concur are not experiencing problems with Concur, but rather with their employer's policies or competence or both.

The value to the employer of a system such as Concur is that the travel policy is effectively baked into the software.

imho,You hit the nail on the head...
Travel perk is an OTA meaning it has its own inventory and does not rely on your TMC or travel agency (who will always have very limited inventory when compared to all the options you can find online today). According to the product page on their website they claim to be integrated to muktiple GDS and to sites like expedia, booking.com etc.

So you can compare them to amex, egencia and some other business OTAs but concur belongs to another category, its mainly an expense management app.
On top of being an actual OTA, Travelperk (and similar tools) offer a layer of travel management features like baked in company travel policies you can configure, approval rules, invoice management and reporting etc. Concur, as an expense management app will offer more robust options in managing and tagging expenses but incomparable as a travel management tool.