12 Things We’re Thankful for This Thanksgiving
1. Launching hotels on our bookings platform.
This year we launched hotels, now available across all devices, adding over 500,000 hotel properties to the TravelBank bookings platform. Knowing business travelers need flexibility, we also created LodgingX, which incentivizes them to book and expense their Airbnb, VRBO, or HomeAway stay, and providing access to an additional 4 million plus properties worldwide. Now travelers can always stay in the perfect place during their business trip whether that’s in a hotel, rental home, or even a friend’s guest room — and earn rewards when they save their company money.
2. Followed by a record number of major product launches.
Speaking of product launches, we are not typically fans of measuring success with the number of features, but our product team shipped an incredible number of new features in a short period of time. Since introducing Hotels and Lodging X to our travel bookings platform in May, some of the major features we launched include Travel Policies, Multi-City Flights, and Booking on Behalf of Another (BOBA), plus a redesigned Rewards Store and hotel search maps and filters.
3. Introducing our global gathering, Altitude.
After launching our flight bookings platform in last year, we packed up a crew of our closest friends, advisors, and customers and flew to Las Vegas to throw a little bash. (Because what better way to celebrate a flight bookings platform than book a bunch of flights?) One year later, we gathered again, but this time our event really grew up. We introduced Altitude, a new kind of global gathering, at which we hosted learning sessions for partners and customers, invited a dozen influencers and press to come experience the way TravelBank does business travel and get a first look at our plans for the product, and of course, celebrated a few milestones for our team, partners, and amazing customers.
4. Seeing TravelBank work for our customers.
One of the highlights of building our product is seeing it work for our customers, whether that’s watching our product scale with a company whose team grew 5x while saving them time and providing world-class customer support, or helping a team go from demo to full adoption with speed and ease. We live to help companies discover a better way to manage their travel programs and expense management, and our team is obsessed with providing the best possible customer support along the way.
“The level of account management is incredible, and it’s a cool team with good people,” says Joel Martin, Senior Manager of Customer Operations at OnRamp. “When I found TravelBank, I was excited because it was very easy to use, and when I reached out via the support chat, they responded immediately and were able to help me out instantly.”
5. Pitching TravelBank to Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary
In August we had the exciting opportunity to stand up on the grand stage at the Global Business Travel Association conference in San Diego and pitch TravelBank to Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary. Our head of partnerships pitched TravelBank during GBTA’s 2018 startup pitch competition alongside SpotHero for Business and Yapta, explaining that at the end of the day our goal is to allow business to focus on what’s really important, growing their business.
6. The incredible events and partnerships we get to be a part of.
We love planning events with our partners and network, which is why in addition to our presence at GBTA, we hosted a boutique hotel launch party for our community in New York City with the Q&A Residential Hotel, were the premier travel sponsors at Summit LA for the second year in a row, passed out boba tea to a bunch of travel managers at the Org Org event, and partner with amazing businesses like Fond and WeWork to share the best travel deals.
7. Our fresh new website.
Our website has received a number of tweaks, revamps, and total redesigns over the past year. We’ve added new pages like our jobs, integrations, and security, and events pages, and we’ve refreshed our home, press, about, partners, and demo pages, to name a few. Plus, we’ve rolled out a new version of our logo and a new font site-wide.
8. Watching our business grow!
Aside from our product roadmap, our growth data keeps us motivated and moving in the right direction. And when we take a look back at how much we’ve grown, we can’t help but get excited. By the time we launched hotel bookings, we’d increased the number of new business users per month by 30x and were on track to reimburse over one million in expenses just this year.
9. Seeing our name in lights (or on a really big billboard).
There’s nothing quite like seeing your name in lights, and that’s exactly the feeling we got when we saw our first billboard going up in Union Square. Since then we’ve been enjoying all the #billboardselfies we’ve been receiving from our team, customers, and friends spotting our brand on their commutes to work.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BoIIGM5H7J7/
10. The press coverage.
Once again we’ve been blown away by the media attention we’ve received, from a feature in Business Travel News highlighting hotels in our bookings platform and our new analytics dashboard to countless pieces about our TravelBank Rank analyzing the best and worst airports for business travelers. We were listed in Xerox’s roundup of 23 great app for business travelers and CB insights named TravelBank one the Top Fintech Startups Of 2018 in their FinTech 250.
11. The love we see on social.
We are always so happy making connections, sharing exciting announcements, and engaging with users on our LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages. Thank you all who have joined our community online!
12. Our ever-growing team.
Team TravelBank has grown so much in the past year. We added a Chief Revenue Officer, new product managers, engineers, account executives, travel agents, and marketers to the team. And there are even more opportunities waiting to be filled.
