Brex Travel Solution Adds Group Mgmt. Feature

Financial services and technology company Brex has added group event management capabilities to its travel offering, focusing largely on helping meeting managers control event budgets.

The group events feature resides within the travel dashboard and mobile app, launched earlier this year, and enables travel and meeting managers to start a group event and invite attendees, Brex VP and general manager Vineet Taneja said. From there, they can track RSVPs of attendees and their indicated preferences, such as food allergies, and nudge travelers who haven’t booked through the same platform.

Travel managers also can determine which modes of travel attendees can book within the platform for the event, such as whether they should be able to book only a flight or a flight and a rental car, Taneja said. Booking a negotiated hotel room block within the platform is not available, but it can scan documents with booking numbers and bring the information into the system, he said. Further integration with room blocks “is something we will evaluate,” according to Taneja.

Travel managers also can provide information within the tool such as agendas, key contact information and rules around the event for attendees. The budgeting feature, however, is what solves one of the major pain points expressed by clients, he said.

“We lead with the concept of budgets,” Taneja said. “Everything flows from there, the pursuit of keeping costs under control.”

With the feature, travel managers can set the budget for an event and monitor via bookings and expenses how closely they are tracking to that figure. If it turns out the manager must request a higher budget, the workflow in the app allows them to do that as well, he said.

While invites are limited only to employees in the system, travel managers also can bring in bookings and data from external guests for budgeting purposes, according to Taneja.

Brex has been building the groups feature since the beginning of the year, and it has been available for early access to clients since the launch of the travel platform in March. Taneja said he had hoped at least 10 to 15 customers would want to test it out, but that soon ballooned to about 40.

“One of the customers actually booked 40 off-sites in one quarter,” he said. “They were doing these five to 10 people off-sites, and every day there was two or three of them.”

Mobile ticket platform SeatGeek has been among those early adopters, and the product has been “providing a more streamlined travel experience for employees while driving higher travel policy compliance and savings,” SeatGeek VP of corporate finance Teddy Collins said in a statement. Attendee size is not limited in the feature, and some early adopters have been using it for events as large as 600 attendees, Taneja said.

With the launch, the software is limited to travel managers and admins to manage the events, but Brex eventually wants to expand that use.

“If they are a people manager, they should be able to start to arrange,” Taneja said. “You have to decentralize it and give this capability to everyone.”

Michael B. Baker www.businesstravelnews.com