13 Things We’re Thankful for This Thanksgiving

1. Launching our flight bookings platform.

Launching our flight bookings platform this May was a huge milestone for us. Designed with the business traveler in mind, this booking experience allows users to find the perfect flight for their business trip with inventory from more than 200 airlines including JetBlue, Copa, and Virgin Atlantic, and travel partners offering special promos for TravelBank users. Many long hours were spent pouring over wireframes, hashing out product designs, testing functionalities, and building native bookings platforms for our product. So when the flight bookings started rolling in we were beside ourselves with excitement.

2. Everyone who celebrated with us in Vegas.

After all that hard work, there was only one thing to do: celebrate. So we packed up a crew of our closest friends, advisors, and customers and flew out to Las Vegas to throw a little bash. Because what better way to celebrate a flight bookings platform than book a bunch of flights?

3. Relaunching our website.

With our product offering expanded to include flight bookings, we took the opportunity to relaunch our website to represent the maturation of our brand. The new site featured photography with some of our favorite travelers and influencers, more navigation, a built out landing page for managers, and a reinvention of our brand colors to help visually communicate the elevated look and feel of our updated brand.

4. Earning rewards for saving company money.

TravelBank rewards started with a simple idea. What if companies rewarded their employees for making better spending decisions? And from there, how far could that go? Would business travelers fly at a different time, out of another airport, or with a different airline if they were paid for their flexibility? We’re especially thankful that we get to use the product ourselves. One employee took a family vacations to Hawaii with the TravelBank rewards she earned and others say they’ll never have to pay for their Lyft and Uber rides again.

5. Seeing it work for new customers.

Working with prospective customers to get their company on board is exciting, and when new customers like Jumpcut give us feedback like, “this is 10 times better than what we were using before,” it’s so motivating. Not only did Jumpcut take a risk with us by leaving an industry incumbent as their expense provider, they embraced our progressive ideas around rewarding employees for spending less money on corporate travel and have been happily booking travel with us since we launched the bookings platform. These success stories are what keep us hard at work.

6. The loyal customers who are invaluable in their honest feedback and steadfast support.

To echo what we gave thanks for last year, we never could have made it to where we are today without our first customers. These loyal companies, like FiscalNote, have helped us stress test our trip budgets, improve the user experience, solve the real issues small business are facing with expense management, and continue to innovate.

7. Constant innovation.

One year ago TravelBank was an app that allowed users to create budgets and track expenses against them. It has been in a constant state of innovation and evolution since then. We have such a great team that takes feedback, creates solutions, moves swiftly to develop these changes, and constantly monitors the success of our product and experience.

8. 6x expenses created in TravelBank.

While we are always celebrating our bookings and rewards features, we don’t forget that expense management is at the core of our product offering and expenses are a huge part of what we do, which is why we loved seeing the number of expenses created in TravelBank grow by 6x during Q3.

9. The amazing partnerships.

From travel partners like Amtrak and JetSuiteX who help us create fun content while experiencing their brand to channel partnerships with the awesome team over at HireAthena and event partners like Summit Series, part of the joy we experience at TravelBank comes from the amazing partnerships we create with outstanding companies like these.

10. The press coverage.

This year we’ve been blown away by the media attention we received, from a feature in Fast Company highlighting the negotiated rates and discounts exclusive to our bookings platform to countless pieces about our Series B funding announcement. Our rewards program was written about by Yahoo! Finance and CNN named TravelBank as one of the 15 app you need to download before your next trip.

11. Getting one of the first App of the Day features in the all-new App Store.

Earlier this year Apple introduced a Today tab in the new App Store, and within this section the editors highlight a curated selection of favorites each day. We were absolutely thrilled to see TravelBank selected as one of the first App of the Day features in the new App Store.

12. The love we’ve seen on social.

We are always so happy making connections, sharing exciting announcements, and engaging with users on our Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram pages. Thank you all who have shared in our joy online!

13. Our ever-growing team.

Team TravelBank has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year. Our engineering team alone grew from eight developers to more than 20. We’ve also added new designers, marketers, growth experts, account executives, an office manager, and a whole group of travel agents to the team. So many, in fact, that we had to move to a new office! And there are even more opportunities waiting to be filled.