Travel management software for small business priced at 25 travelers

Between nothing and about $10,000 a year for our 25-traveler company. The spread is wide because the vendors charge in four different ways: a booking commission you never see, a percentage of each booking, a flat annual fee, or a quote. The table puts all of them on one line, assuming 300 bookings a year at an average of $500 each.

Because hotels, airlines and car rental firms pay the platform a commission on every booking. Navan's pricing page says it plainly: the free plan is powered by travel providers' commission fees. Nothing is hidden, but it does mean the platform earns more when your people book suppliers that pay it well.

In practice that rarely costs a small business much, since the rates shown are usually the same public rates you would find booking direct. It is still worth checking three or four hotel stays against the hotel's own site in your first month. If the free tool keeps coming out higher, a percentage model like Perk's, where you can see exactly what you pay, may be cheaper than it looks in the table.

Once travel volume is high enough. Perk Premium costs $5,688 at $150,000 of travel and about $16,200 at $500,000, because 3 percent scales with spend. TravelBank's $5,000 Premium fee does not scale, and at $250,000 booked its 1 percent rebate starts paying part of it back. By $500,000 TravelBank nets to zero while Perk Premium has climbed past $16,000.

For a 25-traveler company at $150,000, none of that matters yet. The full rebate math by spend level, including the Elite plan, is on our TravelBank alternatives and pricing page. Growth is the reason to look at it now: a company that triples its sales team in two years can outgrow a percentage model faster than its contract term.

Rarely. A company with under about 50 travelers booking mostly domestic trips is well served by self-serve software with 24/7 agent support, which Navan, Perk and TravelBank all include. A traditional travel management company earns its fees on group events, complex international itineraries and negotiated airline contracts.

If you are weighing the two, our breakdown of corporate travel management companies and their fees shows where agency pricing usually lands and when it is worth it.

Start with who travels. A sales team that flies to prospects every week needs a fast mobile app and good hotel inventory in mid-size US cities. A team that travels twice a year for an offsite needs group booking more than anything else. Ask each vendor to show those two cases live, not a canned demo.

Then ask whether every trip is worth taking. Sales travel is usually the biggest line, and the cheapest trip is the one to a prospect who was never going to buy. Teams that qualify leads by phone first before booking a flight tend to cut that line faster than any booking discount will.

Finally, check the card. Navan and Perk work with the cards you already hold, TravelBank adds extras for U.S. Bank commercial cardholders, and a card platform such as Ramp or Brex wants you on its own card. If your people put travel on personal cards today, moving to one company card is the change that makes any of these tools work.

Every tool above checks each trip against your policy. None of them tells the owner that sales, across a dozen in-policy trips plus the rideshares and client dinners that never touch the booking tool, is on pace to spend 140 percent of its monthly travel budget by the 18th. Per-trip rules stop one expensive hotel. They do not see the drift.

That is the job SpendNotify does. It reads the charges on the cards you already use, through forwarded bank transaction emails, an iPhone Shortcut for Apple Pay, or a CSV, OFX or QFX statement, and alerts the budget owner by email, Slack or webhook when a department is trending over budget. It does not book travel, so it works next to whichever tool you pick. The mechanics are on our budget alerts page, and plans start at $199 a month for the whole company.