History is packed with examples of creative forces coming together to drive change.
My mind turns to Orville and Wilbur Wright, the American brothers who started off fixing bicycles in their native Ohio before going on to change the world. In 1903, the Wright brothers made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer, opening the world to the kind of travel most people had up until then only dreamed about.
Passion for collaboration
What this example from the intersection travel and technology highlights is the significance of collaboration. At Amadeus we are similarly focused on the benefits of partnership, combining the strengths of two forces to create something new.
In Emburse we have found a collaborator with whom we are working to better address the business travel demands of large global enterprises. Through a strategic partnership with one of the leading spend optimization organizations, Amadeus is working to provide a suite of one of the best-in-class, end-to-end travel planning and integrated spend management solutions.
This partnership will ensure a seamless experience from trip planning and booking, through to expense reporting, reconciliation, reimbursements and spend analytics. Together, we can allow enterprises to offer their employees travel and spend management tools without compromise.
Calls for change
This is something corporate travel managers have been calling for. According to research conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Amadeus, the digital transformation of travel and expense is a key priority for corporate leaders this year.
Legacy processes - including manual approvals, paper receipts, long waits for reimbursements for on-trip expenses - are no longer fit for purpose in the post-COVID-19 world, and must be gradually replaced. Employees are also calling for a change and business leaders are learning to respond and adapt to a new hybrid world of work.
Partnership for tomorrow
In this context, Amadeus and Emburse will deliver a fully integrated solution to new customers, as well as offering existing solutions to current customers. Amadeus will market Emburse Chrome River as one of its integrated expense management offerings to large corporations in the United States and specific markets in Europe (UK, Scandinavia, and Benelux).
At the same time, Emburse will add Cytric Travel and Cytric Easy for Microsoft Teams to its portfolio of travel spend optimization solutions.
The ambition with this strategic partnership is to provide seamless travel planning and expense for global corporations. We will be working together to collaborate and innovate in building end-to-end spend management.
The two companies offer complementary solutions that span the entire business travel process. Deepening this relationship enables us to become bigger than the sum of our parts by empowering current and future customers to easily combine and integrate each of these processes without requiring a patchwork of vendors.
Emburse and Amadeus have had data integrations for some time, and we share a number of high-profile customers, but this partnership enables both to go beyond managing travel booking and expense.
By leveraging our complementary strengths, we are greatly enhancing the digital and mobile experience for travelers and corporations’ travel spend and policy management throughout the entire travel journey. All of this will enable corporations to optimize their travel spend in terms of cost, carbon emission and productivity collaboration.
By working together in this way, we can move our industry forward.