Concur announced that Amtrak, FlightTrack by Mobiata, GateGuru, MetrO by Kinevia, OAG, Open Table and Taxi Magic will provide third-party services to the travel and expense-management company’s mobile platform.

The integration of these mobile solutions comes about as Concur tweaked its partner program, Concur Connect, by adding mobile APIs and web services for third-party developers.

Concur also says later this year its mobile solution will have the ability to incorporate a Twitter feed and the ability to share travel plans on social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Concur’s mobile apps are available on the iPhone, Blackberry and Android plaforms.

In other corporate travel news, Orbitz for Business announced that it will supplement its expense management solutions by integrating IBM’s Global Expense Reporting Solution.

That’s the second public win for the IBM product in two days as Rearden Commerce revealed yesterday that it too has adopted the IBM Global Expense Reporting Solution.

With the flurry of corporate travel announcements proceeding at breakneck speed because of the National Business Travel Association conference in Houston this week, Cornerstone Information Systems revealed it has integrated Databasics Expense Reporting into Cornerstone’s iBank data-management platform.

The integration of Databasics Expense Reporting means Cornerstone’s corporate clients will be able to take booked data from myriad suppliers and capture it in clients’ expense reporting systems, Cornerstone says.

Concur says its Cliqbook Travel and Travel & Expense clients can now compare rail and air options in one display and book Amtrak routes across the country.

With the Concur-Amtrak agreement, Concur clients can also hold rail or cancel rail reservations, access Amtrak special rates, book multi-segment trips, and facilitate payment and ticketing without any travel agency intervention, among other features, Concur says.

In other news, Concur extended its partnership with OAG by subscribing to an enhanced flights stats service which Concur says updates flight schedules approximately every 20 seconds.

“If I’m in a cab on the way to the airport and open Concur Mobile I can see the gate where I’m departing,” Fred Fredericks, Concur’s vice president, research and development, referring to the new capabilities with OAG.  ”I’m sitting in a meeting and I can see if the flight is on time or if it’s delayed. If you’re a travel arranger using the travel arranger view in Cliqbook, where you can see all the travelers you’re responsible for, you can see who is going to arrive late or on time to be proactive if arrangements have to change.”

“When you combine this new service with Concur Mobile’s pre-existing capabilities to view flight schedules and even change air tickets, it really arms a traveler to be able to stay in control of their travel situation wherever they are, within an application that is linked directly to their corporate travel program and their travel management company,” Fredericks says.

Previously, Concur received OAG schedules through GDS connections, but the enhanced access to OAG enables Concur to speed performance for clients, Fredericks says.

It’s been a banner day for hotel inventory — everyone wants some.

First, as reported, Travelport buys Sprice and picks up some hotel content, and now Concur has entered into two agreements in which it gains access to an additional 460,000 properties (assuming there is no content overlap in Concur’s two deals.)

Concur, which offers travel and expense, and a corporate-booking solutions, plans to integrate 210,000 hotels from hotel.info, which is the international brand of hotel.de AG, with offices in Germany, the U.K., France, Italy, Spain and China.

The integration of Concur and hotel.info means corporate travelers will have access both to negotiated rates from their companies’ travel programs as well as rates from hotel.info’s roster of independent hotels and small chains, making for wide choice.

And, in a second Concur deal, mutual clients of Concur and Hotel Reservation Service now will gain access through Concur Cliqbook Travel to 260,000 properties from HRS at no extra charge.

HRS, headquartered in Cologne, claims to be the largest online provider of non-GDS hotel inventory.

Concur says corporate clients can take advantage of HRS corporate discounts of up to 30% at some 18,000 partners hotels globally.

Concur integrated Google Maps into its travel and expense solution for business travelers to help them manage their mileage.

The integration, part of a release of several new features for Concur Travel & Expense, is designed to enable road warriors and corporations to enhance their management of mileage expenses. Among the tool’s new features:

• Users can select start, end and waypoints on a Google Map for each mileage expense.
• Commute distances can be subtracted from the mileage expense.
• Audit rules point to whether the mileage has been edited to exceed the amount calculated, and whether the commute distance has been deducted.
• Users can access a Most Recently Used list to retrieve stored locations.A per-car configuration can also be used.

Concur also rolled out a series of new airline-ancillary fee expense types, along with dashboards and reports to help corporations process the torrent of new optional services, from bag fees and upgrades to lounge access and onboard meals.

To ensure business travelers adhere to corporate travel policies, the new airline-ancillary fee reporting tool enables organizations to define their own audit rules.

Concur also introduced a Best Practices Dashboard, which measures current client configurations for Concur Travel & Expense against best practices in control & compliance, as well as mobility, the company says.

Concur, which operates a spend management solution and the Concur Cliqbook Travel corporate self-booking tool, closed on a $287.5 million convertible senior note offering April 6 and intends to use net proceeds of $279 million “for general corporate purposes, including potential acquisitions and strategic transactions.”

The Management Travel blog points to a research note byMcAdams Wright Ragen’s Sid Parakh, who argues that companies like Farelogix and KDS could be on Concur’s short list of acquisition targets.

Farelogix President and CEO Jim Davidson labels talk of a Concur acquisition of Farelogix “pure speculation.”

And, a KDS spokesman says the company won’t comment on market speculation.

Parakh envisions Concur making some small to medium-size acquisitions with the proceeds.

Zacks Investment Research has a neutral rating on Concur and states:

“We believe the market for corporate travel and expense management services is large and under-penetrated. The company intends to continue investing in the growth of its customer base and increasing its market penetration by significantly expanding its direct sales force, collaborating with and growing its strong partner network and expanding geographically.

“The company has already sold its products and services to the top 100 Fortune 500 companies. Its customers range from large global public companies with more than 200,000 employees to smaller, single-location private companies. Concur is adequately diversified with no single customer accounting for more than 10% of its total revenues in recent years.”

The Priceline Hotel Negotiator, Kayak and Travelocity mobile apps may be among the top 10 free travel apps in Apple’s Apps Store, but they all lack one feature that’s available in Concur’s mobile app — the ability to book Southwest Airlines.

Concur, the corporate-travel booking and expense-management firm, recently integrated Southwest content into its corporate self-booking tool  and mobile app — available for iPhone, Blackberry and Windows phones — for Concur’s business-travel clients.

Concur says it is “the only travel provider today with direct access to Southwest content.”

[However, travel agencies and corporations hooked up to Travelport GDS have access to Southwest flights. And, Sabre has  access to Southwest schedules, but the access is more limited than Travelport's. And, none of the online travel agencies can facilitate Southwest bookings as Southwest continues to push its airline-direct Web strategy.]

With the Southwest content agreement, announced last summer but implemented in the last week or so, Concur clients get:

• A display with live availability from Southwest and last-seat inventory;

• Booking and ticketing for Rapids Rewards members; and

• Deferred ticketing, cancellations and exchanges.

Through Concur’s recently upraded mobile app, Concur clients now have access to support for Southwest direct-connect flights booked through Concur Mobile.

Among the features of the mobile app:

• Southwest flights are displayed in a trip list; and

• Business travelers can add hotels, ground transportation and dining reservations to their Southwest itineraries.

Concur also added Concur Invoice to the mobile app, enabling business travelers to view line items, supplier information and images, Concur says.

Managers also can sign off on employees’ payment requests or send them back to the traveler for clarification, all from the travelers’ mobile phone, Concur adds.

Update: A little more background…

Concur’s Cliqbook corporate self-booking tool long had access to Southwest through BookingBuilder, a search engine for travel agents which was the first third-party tool to get authorization to connect to Southwest.

Through BookingBuilder, Concur had integrated Southwest’s business-travel offering, SWABIZ.

But, now Concur and Southwest have implemented a direct-connect for Cliqbook and the Concur Mobile app. That means Concur clients can access all Southwest content — not just SWABIZ — and can compare Southwest fares with other airlines’ fares in the same display window and they can apply corporate-travel policy, Concur says.

Clients also can book open-jaw itineraries — flying to one destination and departing from another, for instance — and can hold the fare for up to 24 hours, Concur says.

Amadeus and Concur, vendors of competing corporate self-booking tools, entered into a global strategic partnership which finds Amadeus lending a third-party — in this case, a rival turned ally — some of Amadeus’ close-to-the vest distribution technology for the first time.

The basics of the deal are this:

1) Amadeus eTravel Management, a corporate self-booking tool, integrates its travel bookings into Concur Expense.

2) Amadeus integrates some of its heretofore Amadeus-only distribution technologies, including low-fare search tool Master Pricer and Ticket Changer, into Concur’s corporate self-booking tool, Cliqbook Travel.

It’s a marriage defined by geography and product strength.

Stewart Alvarez, vice president of strategic planning and business development at Amadeus, says the companies’ respective strengths are complementary: Concur is strong in travel in North America and in expense globally, while Amadeus flexes its travel muscles in Europe and Asia.

Amadeus eTravel Management doesn’t have a home-grown expense solution, and previously integrated those of several other vendors.

So, the partnership is a land-grab move for both companies and a way to extend their respective footprints.

Alvarez says the reason Amadeus opted to make Master Pricer and Ticket Changer available for the first time to a third-party, Concur, is because of the strategic nature of the new global partnership.

So, what will the absorption of Amadeus distribution technology by Cliqbook mean for corporate travelers?

Mike Hilton, a co-founder of Concur and its executive vice president of worldwide marketing, answers that Cliqbook will become more robust, with improved pricing results and ticket-change functionality.

Both companies say that the mash-up of the two companies’ corporate-travel solutions will give customers more choice in end-to-end travel and expense solutions.

Both companies were tight-lipped about terms of the agreement other than to say its duration is “several years.”