HRS expands capabilities through Concur Travel

Concur Travel has certified corporate accommodation and payment platform HRS for its new Hotel Connector API, which will offer a wide range of hotel booking capabilities and controls to mutual clients.

While Concur and HRS have been long-time partners in terms of hotel content, there have been limits on what HRS could present to travellers through the legacy Concur platform, said HRS chief product officer Martin Biermann.

“Because it was all built on GDS (global distribution system) formatting and prehistoric standards, a lot of the core aspects the traveller would want to identify and compare across properties were not available,” added Biermann.

Concur’s Hotel Connector allows aggregators and travel management companies to display rates directly into Concur Travel, with HRS becoming the first hotel technology provider to be certified.

HRS can provide normalised content from its multi-source engine, so users can see, filter and compare hotels regardless of the content’s source, explained Biermann.

Users could, for example, filter results to ensure the property has electric vehicle charging available, meets certain sustainability standards or that it accepts a particular type of payment.

They can also access the full range of features within HRS’s Green Stay Initiative, including labels showing whether a hotel meets a company’s minimum standards or has a “champion” badge for properties with outstanding sustainability performance in their market.

Biermann added that travellers can see the carbon footprint of their stay before booking, as well as where rates are coming from to get insights on any loyalty points they can earn, which was not previously available through Concur.

“It is showing a much more consistent and better user experience on the content,” he said. “It looks much nicer and more modern, and you get access to much better filtering capabilities, amenity callouts, loyalty attribution, sustainability data and our globally normalised star rating solution.”

Additionally, working through Hotel Connector allows HRS to interact with Concur so that its recommendation engine can provide “much more tailored results”.

Another new capability in Concur with the integration is the use of HRS’s AI-based rate cap engine, which can calculate rate caps for travellers based on current market conditions as well as policy instead of using a static rate cap.

HRS and Concur are working together to move mutual customers to the new Concur Travel during the rest of this year, according to the companies.

The two companies have a joint roadmap and will be “able to unpack much more additional functionality” over the next three quarters, said Biermann.