Ramp, the expense management company recently valued at $7.65 billion, is entering the company travel sector through a take care of Priceline, a subsidiary of Booking Holdings, as more corporate spending platforms look to retain and attract customers through value-added services.
The recent product, called Ramp Travel, uses artificial intelligence and automation to streamline and simplify the booking and billing process for business travel. Priceline offers Ramp users access to flight, hotel and other travel deals.
Ramp CEO Eric Glyman said there was a big increase in businesses on the platform using cards and budgets for travel, accounting for 20% of annual card spending, up from about 10% in 2021. This ultimately led Ramp to partner with Priceline and launch recent platform features.
“Almost one in five dollars spent on ramp cards is related to flights, hotels and travel-related entertainment,” Glyman said. “That's a good way to sum it all up.”
Ramp said greater than 25,000 corporations now use the platform.
Ramp, a two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company (it ranked thirty second in 2024), has sought to distinguish itself from the growing variety of expense management software vendors by not only tracking spending but additionally helping corporations get monetary savings by flagging duplicate spending or negotiating contracts. Glyman said the identical control approach can be applied to travel, too.
Companies see this as a chance to take market share away from business travel offerings which can be often based on high fees that give travelers control over where employees stay or which airlines they fly with.
Priceline CEO Brett Keller called corporate travel an “archaic business model” during which larger corporations negotiate contracts directly with select suppliers, leading to higher prices on account of the shopper care and customer support they then receive.
“The modern traveler is much smarter today and does most of the work himself. Therefore, he should also deserve access to a much wider range of options and lower prices,” said Keller.
Travel is the most recent feature Ramp added within the last yr, together with Ramp Intelligence, which generates insights for finance teams and proactively suggests savings opportunities, and Ramp Plus, a brand new suite of services for enterprise customers like Shopify.
The spend management market is 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, so these recent additions from Ramp are critical to the corporate's growth and continued disruption.
Glyman said the push into travel and the opposite recent offerings should help expand the shopper base. While the vast majority of Ramp's customers have never raised enterprise capital, the common size of corporations using the platform has greater than doubled previously three years, he said.
“It not only deepens [Ramp] nevertheless it also opens us as much as recent customers that we are able to serve today that weren't possible before,” Glyman said.
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