I am extremely frustrated with Concur Request. It is not the product that was sold to us. We were told it integrates with Travel and Expense for a seamless end-to-end process. WRONG! From the beginning of implementation, we found it was more directly tied to Expense, Travel seems to have been an after-thought. We were advised the best practice is Approve then Book, this would prevent issues with ticketing deadlines. That is true. However, if you want to keep your travelers from booking prior to approval, creating a supremely frustrating loop, you will need to turn off Travel. If you turn off Travel, users cannot search flights or find pricing. The suggestion from Concur was to go outside of Travel (ie Google, Booking.com, etc.) Really?

In addition is if the booking is done offline (booked by TMC) the user has no visibility of their Trip Library. They cannot view their itinerary or make simple changes. That is a major problem now that TMCs are short staffed.

There are so many pain points for users, implementation of this tool has made me the single most reviled person in my company.

I am posting here as a warning to others. This product is not what is promised. I have mentioned this to our Concur teams for almost three years and nothing is being done to make improvements. It is not on the Roadmap, EVER! Shame on me for thinking they would care to improve the user experience for a product we are paying for. In my experience, the only way to get anything done is to make noise. So here I am!

Please feel free to contact me if you are considering adding this to your suite of products. If your travelers don't mind extra work and enjoy unintuitive software, then this is the tool for you.

If you are successfully using this product, bundled or integrated with Travel, please contact me and tell me what I am doing wrong.

However, I don't think anyone out there that can offer advice. Concur can't even find one of their customers that has done it (successfully.)

To be clear, there are some fine individuals that have been trying to help, but the roadblock is always "Concur doesn't support this."

So my message is to you "Concur"... work with your customers.