Save on Corporate Travel with the Navan Hello, Savings Feature Suite

As worldwide economies continue to recover from a disruptive year, finance teams and travel managers are busy determining their travel budgets for 2021 and beyond. To best prepare them for the new corporate travel and spend landscape, Navan is launching the “Hello, Savings” feature suite, designed to give customers access to best-in-industry pricing along with unique discounts, cost-control features, and tools to ensure that each company is getting the most out of their travel program. Here’s what the new suite includes.

Spend Optimization

Unused Ticket Name Change

In 2020, the United States Senate estimated that $10 billion in unused ticket value was one result of COVID-19-related flight cancellations in the U.S. alone—and the credits from those cancellations come with an expiration date.

In fact, 10% of unused tickets in the Navan database have already expired. That’s why Navan introduced an industry-leading automated ticket application last year, ensuring that these credits are visible to travelers and travel managers. Even better, the credits automatically apply to any applicable bookings, reducing wasted spend.

Another obstacle with unused tickets is applying their value across an evolving workforce. Typically, only the original traveler is allowed to use an unused credit or ticket. But Navan’s data show that 1 in every seven unused tickets bear the names of travelers no longer employed by their companies, making a whopping 14% of unused tickets unusable.

But here’s the good news: As business travel resumes, Navan is announcing another industry first — the automatic transference of tickets from an inactive employee to a current traveler. This ability to transfer ticket credits to an active employee, regardless of the name on that ticket, will ensure that companies have more opportunities to utilize these credits before they expire.

Soft Dollar Funds

Another source of funds that often expire before use is the soft dollars included in some corporate airline discount agreements. These soft dollar funds operate like credits; companies can apply them to ancillary purchases with the respective airline, such as change fees and paid seats.

Typically, the process of managing these funds and applying them to bookings is very manual and requires the involvement of a company’s travel managers or its dedicated team of travel agents. But Navan now automates this process, ensuring the value of these funds isn’t lost while simultaneously freeing time for travel managers and travel agents to focus on more important tasks.

Cost Control

Price-to-Beat

The best way to reduce program spend is by balancing traveler incentives with intelligent policy. Navan does both—and better than anyone in the industry. This releases travel managers from bureaucratic duties and frees them up to focus on more strategic work. It also transforms travel bookings into a true partnership between employees and company leadership.

Navan's price-to-beat feature is the secret to incentivizing cost-saving behavior, a tool that dynamically measures market rates and adjusts policy based on active inventory. This alone regularly saves Navan customers 26% on lodging.

But adoption also plays a critical role in creating these savings. And because of Navan’s user-friendly interface, travelers want to use the platform, driving adoption rates up past 90%. That, in turn, gives companies more opportunities to influence employees and direct them toward more responsible booking options.

Policy Settings

With one simple setting adjustment on the Navan admin dashboard, a company’s policies can instantly apply to every location relevant to the company—whether that’s New York City and New Orleans or Seoul and Sydney. How? Using a proprietary algorithm, Navan creates a travel market-specific benchmark value that compares the prices available to each traveler at the time of booking. For companies, this one policy setting can result in savings no matter where their travelers go.

Exclusive Discounts

In addition, Navan has access to thousands of rates that it sources from dozens of providers and thousands of suppliers directly on behalf of clients.

What that means is that Navan customers receive up to 25% off of the best available rate at more than 30,000 hotels globally, including those participating in the Navan Lodging Collection. Clients also receive discounts on car rentals and flights and get access to various specialized offerings, highly competitive consumer rates, and fares from low-cost carriers.

On top of these discounts, the highly experienced specialist and consulting teams at Navan are available to help customers negotiate unique supplier discounts in order to maximize their savings.