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Ramp, the expense management company recently valued at $7.65 billion, is moving into business travel through a cope with Booking Holdings’ Priceline, because the growing variety of corporate spend platforms look to retain and attract customers with additional services.
The brand new product, called Ramp Travel, utilizes AI and automation to assist streamline and simplify the strategy of booking and doing expenses for business travel, with Priceline providing Ramp users access to airline, hotel, and other travel inventory.
Ramp CEO Eric Glyman said it has seen a major uptick in businesses on the platform using cards and budget for travel, representing 20% of annual card spend, up from roughly 10% in 2021. That ultimately led Ramp to the Priceline partnership and recent platform feature.
“One in nearly every 5 dollars spent on Ramp cards is expounded to flights, hotels, entertainment related to travel,” Glyman said. “This can be a substantial solution to just stitch all of it together.”
Ramp said it now has greater than 25,000 businesses using its platform.
Ramp, the two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company (it ranked No. 32 in 2024), has attempted to set itself aside from the growing variety of expense management software vendors by not only tracking spending, but additionally helping corporations get monetary savings by flagging duplicated expenses, or through contract negotiations. Glyman said that very same approach to controls will likely be applied to travel.
The businesses see a chance to take share from corporate travel offerings that always depend on high fees that guarantee control over where employees stay, or the carriers which travelers fly with.
Priceline CEO Brett Keller described corporate travel as an “archaic business model” by which the larger corporations negotiate contacts directly with a select set of suppliers, which leads to higher rates due to the shopper support and repair that’s then used.
“The trendy traveler is way smarter than that now, and so they do a lot of the work themselves, so because of this, they need to deserve access to much broader inventory and lower prices,” Keller said.
Travel is the most recent feature that Ramp has added within the last 12 months, also rolling out Ramp Intelligence, which generates insights for finance teams and proactively suggests savings opportunities, and Ramp Plus, a recent suite of services for enterprise clients reminiscent of Shopify.
The spend management space has turn into crowded, with fellow Disruptors Brex and Navan, in addition to Expensify, Mesh Payments, Airbase and Center competing for market share alongside traditional players like SAP’s Concur, making these recent additions by Ramp critical to its growth and continued disruption.
Glyman said the push into travel and the opposite recent offerings should help grow its client roster. While a majority of Ramp customers have never raised enterprise capital, the common size of corporations using the platform has greater than doubled prior to now three years, he said.
“It does not only deepen [Ramp] but it surely also opens us as much as recent clients that we are able to serve today that we couldn’t before,” Glyman said.
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