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Navan Streamlines Travel, Communication, and Reporting for Dotdigital

Navan team business trip to Berlin

Dotdigital is a London-based marketing automation company that helps companies deliver personalized campaigns through an omnichannel approach.

With employees across the globe, dotdigital needed a scalable, easy-to-use travel management company (TMC) to support the needs of their ever-growing team.

In implementing Navan, Dotdigital has:

  • Benefited from the flexibility of self service through the user-friendly platform
  • Simplified bookings and itinerary changes with real-time answers to user queries
  • Increased employee adherence to the company’s travel expense policies.

Challenges Before Navan

  • Inefficient communication between former TMC and travelers
  • Hassle of manual bookings and approvals
  • Lack of real-time support for last-minute changes and reservations
  • Difficulty enforcing price or class policies for trips and stays

Results with Navan

  • World-class UI makes booking a breeze
  • Round-the-clock travel agents provide answers within minutes
  • Simplified travel-spend management and reporting
  • $86K+ saved on hotels alone

A close look at flight policy settings using the Navan desktop app

Dotdigital Needed a Scalable Way to Support Extensive International Travel

With more than 340 employees worldwide, Dotdigital had outgrown its local travel agency. Two office managers devoted 60-70% of their time to manually handling bookings, and enforcing travel and expense policies was challenging.

A desktop view of travel spend analysis using the Navan app.

Reporting was Cumbersome and Visibility was a Challenge

The fragmented nature of Dotditigal’s previous travel management meant reporting was a hassle. “When you’re receiving hundreds of invoices a month, for every hotel, flight, and train booking, it’s more and more manual work,” explained Paraag Amin, CFO. And there was no clear way to know exactly who was where and when. “There was no visibility platform,” said Amin.

Picture of Navan employees shaking hands

Navan Simplified Booking and Provided Much Needed Duty of Care

For Dotdigital, arranging travel with their former TMC was inefficient and unscalable. Office managers relayed information between the traveler and the TMC, and Dotdigital lacked flexible, self-managed bookings and timely responses to user queries.

Duty of care was another important consideration. Dotdigital’s old TMC made it difficult to locate active travelers, as everything was manually booked. Now the company has real-time visibility into travelers’ locations with Navan's live maps. “We’ve had incidents all over the world, so knowing where people are ticked a lot of boxes,” said Amin.

A collage view of a San Francisco trip itinerary on the Navan mobile app and the Navan spend overview on the desktop app

Dotdigital Chose Navan for Its User Experience & Outstanding Service

Dotdigital knew it wanted a comprehensive solution, or it would be on the hook to create a piecemeal one of its own, which Amin observed would be “just painful.” But the solution had to be user-friendly with real-time, 24x7 365 travel agent support for Dotdigital’s global workforce to embrace it.

Considering the extensive travel of their international workforce, Dotdigital couldn’t afford a months-long implementation process. “Implementing Navan was simple,” said Amin. “It probably took three calls and a meeting.”

In the end it was the personalised care and clean UI that sold Dotdigital on Navan. “The level of contact from initial point to decision was substantially more than the competitors,” said Amin. “When you have that relationship with the senior level, it helps.”

Navan was more than easy to use, but also to do reporting and see where a traveler is at any point — that’s very helpful.

Paraag Amin

CFO

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