Concur's core product is shockingly awful. My company recently switched to it, and I don't know anyone who actually uses it. Most of us have figured out we get lower prices and less hassle by just ordering directly from the airlines / hotels and booking them to or corporate credit cards. If you're in a hurry, we can just call AmEx travel and pay $30 for them to book the trip for us using their travel agent terminals -- which of course have every flight from every airline. The end result is usually that we pay more for our travel and our company loses control; but honestly Concur's application crashes 90% of the time I try to use it with JavaScript errors, so I'm not sure it's really a viable solution in the first place.

The problem, of course, is the commoditization of the airline industry. Leisure travelers are, at this point, loss leaders that fill empty seats for their real business: consultants and sales people who travel 50-100+ flights a year. The industry is overly reliant on an increasingly shrinking segment of business travelers who fly on higher-fare tickets and often on short notice, so it does everything it can to make that kind of travel very painful UNLESS you do it all with a single airline and use full-fare tickets. If you thought air travel was unbearable on your last vacation, imagine how bad it is to do that 3 or 4 times a week -- so you try to consolidate to get a few perks like early boarding, lounge access or first class upgrades (nobody pays for domestic first class -- they're almost always loyalty upgrades).

So the real problem is that the airlines don't care at all about your $200 flight to Tampa to visit granny. They have to fill the seats to pay off the leases on the airplanes, but they make almost zero margin off of you because leisure travelers are so price-conscious. Business travelers are willing to pay an extra $300 for the ability to cancel their ticket on short notice, and often carry less baggage and cost less to serve. So the airlines try to lock in those types of customers with loyalty programs (which are so scaled back as to be nearly worthless unless you fly over 125 segments a year -- roughly 3 flights a week, every week of the year that's not a holiday), by making it harder to comparison shop, etc. and screw the little guys.