As global workforces grapple with the disconnect of remote working, efficient business travel is a top priority, offering access to new markets, insights, and development opportunities. However, it comes with complications, as revealed by new SAP Concur research of 3,750 travelers and 600 travel managers across global markets.

Many influences are driving – and sometimes stalling – the business travel industry. To ensure maximum productivity and well-being for travelers and travel managers, businesses must support them with the right education and tools in 2024 and beyond. To ensure smooth running and maximize their investments in business travel, business leaders must understand its friction points. The sixth SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey explores some of the most pressing challenges facing business travelers today. These are the top five takeaways:

1. The Threat of Disruption

• Eighty-eight percent of travelers have been forced to make last-minute changes in the past year because of unexpected delays, cancellations, or the need to re-route.
• Eighty percent opt to add “booking buffers” to the start or end of their journey, or both, incorporating extra time to counteract unexpected schedule changes. This frustrating cycle discourages business travel altogether.

2. Traveler Safety Concerns

• Business travelers cite safety (44%) or political or social (35%) concerns about the destination as the most common reasons that would cause them to decline a business trip.
• Many travel managers experience burnout due to the range of aggravating factors they must consider when planning and provisioning for business trips. A third feel like they are expected to take on a more strategic role without further training.

3. The Toss-Up Between Sustainability and Costs

• Over a quarter of business travelers are willing to decline a business trip due to the environmental impact or the inability to choose sustainable options.
• Twenty-seven percent, on the other hand, claim their company has cut back on paying more for sustainable travel options over the past 12 months.
• Over a third of travel managers face difficulties because they are expected to provide more sustainable travel options without an adequate budget.

4. Unequal Access to Travel Opportunities

• Two in three business travelers say that travel is critical for their career advancement – but the same proportion feel they haven’t received equal opportunity to travel compared to their colleagues.
• Staff cite reasons for unequal access such as their level of seniority (19%), age (18%), and gender (11%).

5. The Need for AI Solutions and Education

• Most travelers (95%) are open to using AI-enabled options when arranging travel, but there is a prevailing “wait and see” attitude. Fewer than one in ten are comfortable using AI-enabled options currently.
• Eighty-nine percent of business travelers want more company support, including assurances for personal data protection, potential biases, and protection from repercussions if AI-assisted bookings contravene company policy.

Leaders won’t be able to solve current travel disruption overnight – but they can make it more manageable for staff. By introducing measures to improve travel flexibility, training opportunities, and next-generation software solutions, organizations can adapt to a challenging market and future-proof their business travel posture for the long term.

For more information about the survey, including additional findings, please download our business traveler, travel manager, and SMB business traveler whitepapers.

Charlie Sultan is president of Concur Travel at SAP Concur.

The SAP Concur Global Business Traveler Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research between April 5-26, 2024, among 3,750 business travelers in 24 markets: U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Italy, Spain, ANZ (Australia, New Zealand), Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia), Japan, Korea, India, Mexico, Brazil, SEA (Singapore, Malaysia), South Africa, Portugal, Switzerland, and Austria. Data has been weighted to facilitate tracking.
The SAP Concur Global Travel Manager Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research between April 5-26, 2024, 2024, among 600 travel managers, defined as those who direct or administer travel programs for businesses, across 6 markets: Germany, Canada, Japan, ANZ Countries (Australia and New Zealand), UK, and U.S.

The SAP Commerce Cloud solution has been a resounding commercial success since its launch in 2018. Today it enables thousands of global companies across over 25 industries and more than 65 countries to process hundreds of billions of euros of GMV securely and reliably. During the holiday season alone, we helped companies process up to US$110M in gross merchandising value per minute with 100% uptime.

While the solution’s functional breadth and depth is well documented, SAP’s primary focus leading up to 2022 was platform modernization. This focus was necessary to make sure that our customers, as well as SAP Commerce Cloud, were set up for long-term success. As a result of that focus, SAP ranked as a major player in the IDC B2C Digital Commerce Report back in 2020. While the modernization journey is truly never-ending, we have clearly turned a corner on that front.

During the last 24 months, this has allowed SAP to focus its investments on functional innovations that can drive measurable business results – including in generative AI – and in 2023 alone SAP delivered over 150 of them. As a result of both modernization and functional innovations, we are delighted to share that SAP has regained leadership in both the IDC B2B and B2C Digital Commerce Reports in 2024. IDC isn’t the only analyst that is paying attention, as Gartner has also improved SAP’s position in the Leader quadrant in 2023 relative to competitors, after a couple of years of a widening gap.

How did we do it? Knowing that if our customers win, we win, we listened and executed relentlessly. Our enterprise customers run some of the largest commerce deployments on the globe, and they told us in no uncertain terms that they needed a platform that solved their very complex commerce challenges with the utmost flexibility, but not at the cost of agility or TCO. As a consequence, we made a long-term commitment towards modernization by advocating for and adopting pragmatic composability to help our customers evolve on their digital transformation journey, no matter where they are from a digital maturity perspective. We accelerated innovation for SAP Commerce Cloud through an all-cloud deployment model with continuous innovation across all commerce areas including headless, API- and event-based architecture, composable storefronts, modern microservices-based implementation of core areas such as payments, promotions, order management, sourcing, and inventory availability, and more.

Here are some of the innovation highlights that we have communicated recently and that help our customers succeed at critical points in the customer experience they are trying to deliver.

Generative AI

For many years, AI in commerce has been about personalizing the customer experience to increase loyalty and profitability. While this remains true and important, generative AI is opening more ways to empower commerce teams to remove mundane tasks and work more efficiently, with the end results of connecting customers more quickly with the products they’re looking for. 

To leverage AI for better outcomes, SAP utilizes its wealth of operational and experiential data, along with third-party data, to help provide the holistic view our customers need. For SAP Commerce Cloud, a new set of AI tools has been made available to help supercharge catalog management and product discovery. Many commerce managers know the difficulty and mundaneness of keeping up with catalog hygiene. Although this task is arduous, it’s critical for product visibility and discoverability. Our set of AI capabilities within SAP Commerce Cloud can review product tags and catalogs, generate and customize product descriptions, embed supplemental technologies such as machine vision, and guide customers to the right choice for their needs. 

Order Management Systems

A connected enterprise is a prerequisite to delivering seamless and delightful customer experiences. Acting as the central nervous system and connective tissue of unified commerce, order management systems enable orchestration of orders from order placement to fulfillment and delivery.

At NRF, we announced new retail capabilities through SAP Order Management Services, including the SAP Order Management solution for sourcing and availability as well as SAP Order Management foundation. With these modular solutions, organizations can create frictionless omnichannel experiences that can respond to business events, such as fraud holds, delivery, or in-store pickup, and determine the optimal sourcing strategies to deliver customer satisfaction while protecting margins and optimizing organizational business outcomes.

Open Payment Framework

With our latest announcement at Shoptalk, we are working to help accelerate our customers’ time-to-market with the open payment framework for SAP Commerce Cloud. This packaged business framework can connect SAP Commerce Cloud via low-code or no-code with third-party payment service providers, including Stripe, Adyen, WorldPay, and Airwallex – with numerous more planned for the future. This modular, extensible, headless framework helps give power back to retailers to pick their own payment partners based on their needs, whether local or abroad. Organizations can be equipped to scale faster and avoid being confined to a single provider, making wrangling multiple connectors and manual flow mapping a thing of the past.

Front-End Framework Modernization

Digital experience composition, as Gartner puts it, is the new frontier in commerce composability that leverages agile API orchestration and front-end as a service to deliver personalized experiences in a unified way. Our vast ecosystem of best-in-breed partners helps us provide a strong digital experience composition, so that customers can deliver the experiences that their customers want. We continue to grow our partner ecosystem as the market evolves and new technologies emerge, striving to provide multi-business model, multi-market, and multi-industry coverage.

Commitment to Sustainability

Part of SAP’s mission is to provide the tools to empower our customers to attain their sustainability objectives. That commitment extends to SAP Commerce Cloud, as we offer a recommerce module to embrace new circular business models and help the world reduce retail waste. SAP Recommerce caters primarily to retailers to help digitally create processes to introduce consumer excess as well as restored, returned, and used products back into the market, creating a circular revenue stream to help drive additional growth.

As we continue our commerce journey, we are working with our customers to help ensure that they can innovate their businesses with speed and pivot when the market demands it. Customers like Roche are able to step into the future with software monetization platforms, powered by integrations with SAP Commerce Cloud.

Roche is a leading multinational Swiss healthcare company that provides cancer treatments around the world. To transform the patient journey, Roche adopted digital solutions that can empower people to manage their health better, allow healthcare providers to confidently diagnose and treat diseases, and help healthcare institutions unlock greater efficiency. With SAP Commerce Cloud, integrated with SAP Subscription Billing and SAP Entitlement Management, Roche was able to propel itself into the future by enabling the commercialization of its digital products, removing manual interventions, allowing customers to upgrade or downgrade subscriptions via a self-service portal, and providing product managers the ability to quickly develop, test, and deploy ideas among broad ranges of business models. All this only took Roche four and a half months to go live in three countries and 13 more within the year.

“If we want to be customer-oriented and efficient, a software monetization platform is a key enabler. It is indispensable for serving, fulfilling, and servicing digital products in a scalable way, laying the foundation for our future business.”

Moritz Hartmann, Global Head of Roche Information Solutions

We invite you to learn more and reach out to see how SAP Commerce Cloud helps deliver profitable digital commerce growth, from discovery to delivery and beyond. Check out our latest blog on our Q1 2024 release highlights.