2021 U.S.-Booked Air Volume: $27.5 million
2021 Total Global T&E: $250 million
Primary U.S. Online Booking Tool: Concur
Primary U.S. Payment Supplier: American Express
Card Program: Individual Bill/Central Pay
Primary Global Expense Tool: Microsoft Dynamics
Consolidated U.S. TMC: Amex GBT

Computing software icon Microsoft changed its travel program entirely during the course of the pandemic, and that continued in 2021. The company emphasized purposeful travel and maximizing value for the money spent. The company reassessed the value of travel to its core mission and has focused, instead, on providing accessible meeting and communication opportunities for in-person and remote meeting attendees. Of its $27.5 million in U.S. point-of-sale travel initiated in 2021, half was domestic and 98 percent was handled by travel management partner Amex GBT.

The company’s Tripism platform, which supports the traveler experience, now operates with a focus on personal safety while traveling for business, as well as offering insights and destination information for employees’ personal travel. The peer-to-peer travel information sharing platform now has more than 100,000 Microsoft users.

Microsoft began its return to office in the second quarter of 2022. Virtual meeting options have become the default strategy for most travel requests and are embedded in booking workflows.. The company expects its will be many years before business travel returns to pre-pandemic levels, which reached $275 million in 2019.

Sustainability continues to be a key concern. Microsoft in 2021 was the first corporate customer working with the Roundtable for Sustainable Biometrics and the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance to pilot a book-and-claim scheme that verifies the authenticity of sustainable aviation fuel production and ensures the attendant carbon savings is claimed only once.

The company continued its collaborations to integrate travel functionality into Microsoft software products. In 2022 Amadeus and Microsoft integrated Cytric travel booking capabilities into Microsoft 365 and began a pilot program with select employees. It was the latest in a vision partnership between the two companies.