Altitude Recap: Introducing Patent Pending SuperItinerary and More

What’s New

We’re excited to have announced some of our biggest product updates to date at our annual conference, Altitude. With our users in mind, we’re releasing exciting new features to continue revolutionizing the business travel and expense experience.

With new features like our patent pending SuperItinerary, travelers will be able to manage their trips with little effort and book everything they need for travel in our new TravelBank Marketplace. From the manager’s side, we’ve simplified the onboarding process and are rolling out a new user management experience that includes features like HRIS sync and an employee directory. We’re also revealing numerous improvements for booking travel and managing policy.

If you couldn’t join us in Vegas to see these updates in person, here’s a recap of what you missed. We hope you can join us at Altitude next year!

SuperItinerary

TravelBank is changing the entire business travel experience. With this product release, users will get access to:

Mobile Itinerary View

A brand new mobile itinerary view for their business trips, creating an easier, organized, and more streamlined travel experience. Available in Q4 2019.

Trip Budgets

New and integrated trip budgets to guide spend based on policy, support faster return on reimbursement, make it easier for employees to see what travel policy is, and help admins spend less time processing expense reports. Available in early 2020.

TravelBank Marketplace

The TravelBank Marketplace offers a one-stop shop for all your business travel needs, such as airport lounge passes, ground transportation, and even bleisure activities, with exclusive deals and offers. The TravelBank Marketplace is available to registered TravelBank users today with over 30 brand partners including Clear, Lyft, Brex, GroundLink, Uber, SkyRoam, Wag! and Turo.

Combined, these features create our SuperItinerary experience, a reinvention of the travel itinerary. We’re excited to power travelers throughout their entire trip from the moment they book to when they walk back through their front door with SuperItinerary. We’re bringing the entire business trip experience together in one place.

Onboarding

We’ve revamped our onboarding experience with simple actionable steps and in-app guidance to help your company get set up on TravelBank faster than ever. The new onboarding experience helps company admin import and invite users with HRIS sync.

Next, set up your travel policies with a few taps, whether its your own or you’re opting to get started with our recommended policy. Then easily add ways to reimburse employees. This all can be done pretty instantaneously and has more than doubled our onboarding conversion rates. The experience is live today in the TravelBank app.

User Management

We serve a lot of customers who are rapidly growing their business and travel program with us. To better scale with you and allow our growing clients to do more, we’ve updated our user management. Invite your employees to join TravelBank whenever you’re ready with our easy user invitation options, like syncing with your company’s HRIS or uploading a CSV file.

It only takes you 30 seconds to add a new employee as a TravelBank user, it’s simple to check when your HR system was synced last, and we’ve added a user directory so admin can easily view more employees to do more in one screen. This feature will be available to registered admin users this week.

Expense Policy

Each year we host a hackathon and invite our entire company to help us innovate and deliver new product features into the hands of our customers. This year did not disappoint. One of the winning hackathon projects looked at all the best aspects of our travel policies and applied them to expenses.

Our new expense policies will be easy to set up, and will help you communicate your unique policies more clearly so exployees know exactly what is and is not reimbursable. This feature will be available in early 2020.

Employee Travel Tracker

Another hackathon project, our employee travel tracker allows admin to see where your employees are traveling and get in contact with them. Combined with your duty of care provider of choice, this gives your company better visibility and coverage of traveling employees. Also available in early 2020.

NGS 1 Star Flights

We recently unveiled the Next Generation Storefront (NGS) display within our flights booking experience to deliver a richer and more informed shopping experience for business travelers. The NGS six star system helps travelers quickly compare airline seats and fare types.

We’ll soon allow companies to decide whether they want to display NGS 1 Star inventory, including basic economy and low cost carrier flights, for their employees to book in-app. We’re making this inventory available because we recognize that some organizations have price conscious users who frequently comparison shop and feel the lowest fare options are appropriate for their travel needs. Available next week. If your organization is interested in turning on this inventory for employees reach out to us at support@travelbank.com.

Traveler Profile

We always aim to support a quick and easy booking experience, and with TravelBank you can book a flight in less than two minutes. To help you book your business trips even faster, we’re introducing a new streamlined traveler profile, accessible at any time from the menu of our mobile app.

Save your known traveler number, add all of your airline and hotel loyalty numbers, or store your preferred payment methods. This is available today on the mobile app.

Exclusive Hotel Rates

TravelBank provides your business access to discounted rates on our extensive hotel inventory, including popular hotel chains and boutique properties. Our exclusive rates can save users on average 20% on hotel bookings. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses, whose travel spend wouldn’t typically allow them access to discounted rates.

On top of that, any corporate rates for companies using TravelBank will be available to their employees as well, enabling larger clients to take full advantage of their existing negotiated rates. Additionally, users can earn loyalty points for their favorite hotels or book alternative lodging options like Airbnb with TravelBank. Live in the app and available to registered users.

Group Travel

New and exclusive to TravelBank customers, we now support multi-passenger bookings for up to seven people on one reservation, and soon users will be able to make these bookings on behalf of a department or a specific group of users.

TravelBank will remember the travelers you’ve booked trips for in the past and make it easy to book for them again, including their traveler profile information like frequent flyer numbers. Will be available in early 2020.

Better Travel Support with Blackbox

We’ve developed one place for travel agents to better manage bookings and provide more efficient travel support to our travelers. With our new blackbox tool, our travel agents will be able to quickly access the information they need to support customers without toggling between multiple screens or systems. For the customer, this means better and more efficient customer support. This update is live.

Travel Policies

Use TravelBank to create, customize, communicate, and enforce your travel policy. With TravelBank, company admin can set advance booking rules, define hard caps for travel-related costs, and build in the appropriate amount of budget flexibility. Despite allowing for highly-customized nuances, TravelBank travel policies are able to handle highly-customized nuances while remaining easy to adopt and enforce through automated manager approvals and booking notifications.

And employees can view their own travel policy parameters directly in the app and experience policy guidance throughout the booking processes so they know they’re making the right choice for your company every time they book travel. Available today in the TravelBank app.

Car Rentals

TravelBank’s car rentals is built right into our award-winning booking experience alongside our flights and hotels offerings to provide a one-stop shopping experience. You can search and reserve available vehicles for easy pickup at airports from the desktop or mobile app, and hit the road. Available today in the TravelBank app upon request. If you’d like access to rental car bookings, please reach out to our team at support@travelbank.com.