New Features Navan Travel Released this Summer

Navan’s product and engineering teams are constantly working to improve the features that have made business travel easier for millions of users — even during summer’s blistering heat waves! Whether you’re a traveler, travel manager, finance leader, or part of the procurement team, these updates will make managing and optimizing your company’s travel program smoother for everyone.

Highlights include: new booking functionalities that make for an even easier flight management experience; high-speed progress across European rail capabilities; and more granular custom field configuration. Here’s what to know about what our teams have been working on the past few months!

Flights Platform Evolution

As content distribution becomes increasingly fragmented, Navan’s flights team is focused on guiding customers and travelers through an evolving industry that requires more agility and technical expertise than ever before, while finding new ways to deliver an even greater online-first air product.

Redesigned Flight Exchange Flows

Navan’s redesigned flight exchange experience brings more transparency and clarity to a process that is, for many TMCs (travel management companies), often impossible without agent interaction. The improved flight exchange experience brings significant usability improvements and a new view enriched with detailed fare rules, amenity information, and flight brand details that make it easier to explore alternative options, whether on the same airline or another when available. Changing flights is now easier — whether at your desk or on the move and using Navan’s mobile app.

Cross-Provider Shopping

Traditionally, many TMCs tend to use one system (aka “inventory provider”) to source and provide travel options to travelers and, therefore, cannot combine fares from multiple providers. But Navan’s multi-source strategy enables users to access fares sourced from GDSs, aggregators, and direct connections.

Cross-provider shopping is the next step in unlocking the full value of our technology’s unique capabilities, with travelers now able to shop and mix fares across Navan’s different provider connections.

Whether it’s combining an inbound NDC fare with an outbound EDIFACT (“traditional GDS”) fare or a low-cost carrier with a full-service carrier, travelers can book multiple combinations of inbound/outbound fares directly in Navan. They’ll unlock more return options and find potentially cheaper round-trips.

Upgraded Rail Capabilities

Rail travel has made a solid comeback in the past few years — especially in Europe, with the growth of high-speed networks and the rail market opening. Navan continues to invest heavily in expanding our rail offerings, with more options and new features to enhance the user experience.

OUIGO France: Now on Navan

OUIGO is now available on Navan! This low-cost, high-speed French rail carrier is part of the SNCF railway network and provides long-distance journeys across France at some of the most competitive prices. With this addition, Navan offers direct access to rail fares from all major carriers on the SNCF network.

Navan customers can now choose between SNCF, OUIGO, and Trenitalia trains on a Paris-Lyon journey, giving them more options and potentially greater savings.

Navan customers also get access to many of the continent’s leading rail providers, such as UK Rail (which includes more than 25 companies), SNCF (including TGV, TER, Intercités, and Lyria), Renfe (including Avlo), Deutsche Bahn, SBB, Italo (NTV), Trenitalia, NS International, SNCB, and Eurostar, as well as Amtrak in the U.S. Navan’s rail content is accessible from most countries, so travelers can book journeys wherever they may be.

Select Your Seats on Deutsche Bahn Trains

Now, you can reserve seats on Deutsche Bahn trains when booking on Navan — so you can pick the window seat, the quiet carriage (“Ruhebereich”), or simply avoid sitting near the toilet. The real-time seat map functionality works for single-passenger and group bookings, meaning you can sit together with your colleagues (or by yourself, if you prefer). Navan is the first TMC to build this functionality via Trainline. Along with DB, Navan users can also reserve seats on Trenitalia trains, SNCF First Class, and soon OUIGO.

Custom Fields Improvements

With custom fields, admins can collect additional information from travelers at the end of the booking process (or when submitting a transaction in Navan Expense), and this information is then automatically added to booking reports.

Whether you’re asking travelers to indicate why they are traveling (perhaps an office visit or a team offsite) or want to make sure bookings are assigned to the correct project code, custom fields are a great way to tie additional information to each transaction. Following the release of conditional approval flows earlier this year, the latest improvements to Navan’s custom fields feature unlock more granular controls for admins and further simplify the checkout experience for travelers!

Conditional Approval Flows

For many companies, the person with the context to approve a booking is not always the same, and can vary based on trip purpose. This is often the case with consulting firms, for instance, which tend to have a different approver for each project instead of a single default approver per employee.

With conditional approval flows, admins can assign an approver to a custom field answer (for instance, set approvers based on project code), and Navan will route the booking approval to them, ensuring the person with the necessary context can review and confirm the correct bookings.

Nested and Targeted Fields

Larger travel programs often deal with an extensive number of custom fields and associated answers. But with deeper configuration settings, Navan is helping simplify the checkout experience for travelers and reduce the risk of errors.

• Targeted checkout fields: Configure fields and responses so they are only visible to specific travelers — either based on HR attributes or the particular users — so they only see the options relevant to them.
• Nested fields and follow-up answers: Reduce complexity and errors by creating follow-up questions where the available answers will vary based on previous ones. For instance, if admins nest “Clients” under “Trip Purpose,” they can now set “N/A” as the only selectable value if “Internal Meeting” was first selected.

With a relentless focus on making business travel easier for everyone involved in a company’s travel program, Navan’s teams continuously build and ship features aimed at all users of its platform. Over the past few months, the releases mentioned above and additional ones such as additional data points, UX improvements, and an expanded global footprint have all contributed to a steady rise in travel program improvements and customer satisfaction.

Get in touch to learn more about Navan’s latest releases and see how your program could benefit!