Powering Brex Travel and enabling a seamless T&E experience

Brex serves more than 200,000 companies, ranging in size from startups to enterprises. The company has grown rapidly from its early days as a corporate card provider and now offers a full spend management platform including travel booking and servicing, powered by Spotnana. 

Travel usually accounts for around 12% of total corporate spend, according to a JP Morgan study, which represents a major gap for expense management providers that don’t offer an integrated travel solution. 

In order to bring its vision of total spend management to life for its customers, Brex needed to offer robust travel management service through its platform in a way that integrated natively with its card and spend management solutions. Brex’s total spend management grants organizations insight into a combination of card spend, reimbursement, bill pay, business accounting, travel, and more.

Brex chose to partner with Spotnana to add corporate travel booking and management capabilities to its platform instead of building its own solution from scratch, because Spotnana’s open Travel-as-a-Service platform enabled them to provide a seamlessly embedded and deeply integrated travel experience for its customers with comprehensive content at competitive prices.

“Spotnana’s approach and philosophy is to turn the business model on its head where the traveler is getting the best choice, the most inventory, the best fares,” said Karandeep Anand, Chief Product Officer at Brex, on an episode of the Travel Is a Human Emotion podcast. “We decided to go and partner with Spotnana to get to where the puck is going, not where the world has been for the longest time.”

Spotnana helped Brex expand its product capabilities efficiently while maintaining focus on its core payments and spend management offerings. Ultimately, the partnership enabled Brex to accelerate its product roadmap and quickly deliver more value to customers.

“We were fortunate to find a partner like Spotnana,” said Vineet Taneja, Vice President of Product Management and GM of Travel at Brex. “There are two things that really work in our partnership. One, there is a philosophic link between Brex and Spotnana: both of us know our domains and we go deep. We do right for the customer and we are not shy to disrupt things in the market.

“Second is that Spotnana is building its Travel-as-a-Service platform API-first, and nobody else is doing this with the depth of travel inventory and the capability set that Spotnana has built.”

Brex Travel’s reception from customers has been overwhelmingly positive with travelers benefitting from a 97.8% self-booking percentage and a 4.69 out of 5 in support satisfaction.

Industry-leading business travel 

Partnering with Spotnana allowed Brex to bring Brex Travel to market quickly with industry-leading functionality and a seamless experience for travelers.

“Spotnana aims to be the travel platform, not the travel product,” said Anand. “There’s a huge difference in a small statement, but I think that vision underlines why we picked Spotnana. It’s a platform that you can customize to your brand and work with your developers to make it feel real.”

Taneja believes that building Brex Travel from scratch would have required 200+ engineers and years of development time, which would have pulled focus from its core payment and expense business.

Spotnana’s flexible APIs enabled the right level of customization and white labeling for Brex’s desktop and mobile users. All travel budgeting is handled seamlessly using Brex’s spend management functionality, with travel data instantly populated in an organization’s spending dashboard.

“The Brex Travel user experience is definitely something that I am proud of,” said Taneja. “It was almost like everything was co-built together by our engineering, product, and design teams, which gave us a great look and feel, especially the business traveler’s experience on mobile.”

Brex customers can also redeem their Brex Rewards points for travel bookings seamlessly, due to Spotnana’s support for multiple forms of payments and ability to integrate with loyalty programs. Brex Rewards points have been redeemed on 24% of all trips booked using the service.

World-class service for everyone

In addition to integrating Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform for online booking, Brex works with Spotnana agents to service travelers. By partnering with Spotnana for servicing, Brex was able to launch to customers without building out an internal travel operations department.

“The strength of Spotnana’s servicing is that the Agent Desktop is part of the same travel platform, enabling agents to see exactly what an employee or a traveler sees,” said Taneja. “When the traveler reaches out, the agent is looking at the same thing. That’s real and that’s important for traveler satisfaction.”

Brex Travel customers benefit from Spotnana’s fast pace of innovation, leading to improved functionality over time along with industry-first net new features. Brex Travel is exceeding its goals in both traveler satisfaction and growth for the product.

“When we launched Brex Travel, we thought mid-market would be the only target segment that we would appeal to,” said Taneja. “We were actually surprised by the kind of queries we get from enterprises, because they see our travel experience is great.”