HRS Extends Partnership With SAP Concur For Corporate Travel Booking

Business travel accommodations firm HRS has lengthened its partnership with SAP Concur by five years through a strategic arrangement, according to a Thursday (Aug. 13) announcement from HRS.

HRS said the deal comes on the heels of many years of providing travel savings to companies through payment as well as bill reconciliation technologies, “continuously innovative” offerings and wide but focused content selections.

SAP Concur customers can now access the HRS Lodging-as-a-Service platform through mobile or desktop technologies. The technology includes a more simplified and multiple-source hotel reservation avenue for businesses that comes with Rate Filter technology to remove squatter rates in addition to other incorrect prices.

In addition, the Rebooking technology of HRS harnesses automation to find initial reservation rate savings from different hotel content sources. The platform comes across lower rates and automatically makes a new reservation for the traveler.

The platform also has a recommendation engine, which is fueled by artificial intelligence (AI). HRS said the technology helped drive a substantial increase in reservations from top 10 search results, allowing for more preferred properties to be used and decreasing shopping as well as browsing time.

In addition, the platform comes with “universal enablement” of hotel rewards offerings.

HRS also said Concur Travel is among the first to allow for the company’s Clean & Safe Protocol.

“Our proprietary Lodging-as-a-Service platform is the leading end-to-end solution for corporate lodging today,” HRS CEO Tobias Ragge said in the announcement. “We’re combining tremendous process efficiencies and direct cost savings with seamless technology that drives traveler satisfaction — all enhanced to support the revised Duty-of-Care guidelines companies have implemented in the wake of COVID-19.”

Last October, news surfaced that HRS was launching a new business hotel payment technology to reshape how worldwide hotel business payments are handled. The Invisible Pay offering seeks to take on the historical challenge of “high levels of out-of-policy spend and insufficient use of preferred hotels” via “advanced payment automation” per news at the time.