The Sky’s the Limit: Introducing Coupa Travel & Expense

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of the new Coupa Travel & Expense, now with seamless travel booking, unified expense management, a fully integrated mobile application, and live on-the-road traveler support.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Coupa has kept a close eye on how companies are managing their travel and expenses. Though travel patterns have changed, the pandemic has also shown all of us that a face-to-face conversation with a colleague, partner, or customer is still irreplaceable. As business travel begins to pick up again, it’s time for companies to think about how they can get maximum value from their travel spend.

That’s why we’ve built a new travel booking experience for our industry-leading expense management platform. Coupa Travel & Expense further broadens our Business Spend Management (BSM) capabilities and provides organizations with greater visibility and control over their T&E spend. It’s the best of both worlds: Coupa makes it easy for employees to book great travel options on web and mobile and simplifies the complexities of corporate travel management for organizations.

Delivering a user-centric experience

Today, almost half of all companies struggle to get the large majority of their travelers to use their company-preferred travel booking tool.¹ Here at Coupa, we asked ourselves: What’s the point of trying to get a picture of your travel spend if most of that picture is missing?

That’s why — at the very outset of building this product with and for our customers — we made it our top priority to create a platform that travelers would be thrilled to use to book business travel.

With Coupa, users book trips in fewer than five minutes with our smart travel recommendations and leverage our powerful mobile app to get live travel agent support while on the road. Our seamless integration between travel and expenses makes submitting an expense report quick and painless.

Even better, Coupa Travel & Expense includes Travel Saver, a powerful cost-savings capability that runs automatically in the background and is available out of the box. Travel Saver continually scans flight and hotel prices, identifies when a price has dropped after travelers have booked, and automatically re-books the lower rate. On average, customers save 1–3% of their air and hotel spend without lifting a finger.

A user-centric experience not only reduces the amount of time organizations spend in the weeds of questions and support emails, but also dramatically increases spend visibility and control.

Unifying T&E management

We also learned from our customers that they waste hundreds of hours managing siloed legacy systems that are typical in today’s T&E programs. With this launch, our platform becomes the single end-to-end place where customers can book travel, manage expenses, source travel, and more.

Unifying T&E with the Coupa BSM platform not only makes the lives of end-users, travel administrators, and finance teams easier, but it also creates unique spend optimization opportunities.

For example, organizations can leverage Procurable Insights to easily identify expenses that can be moved onto contracts for future savings. Or, they can drive even more savings with Spend Guard’s continuous AI-based expense fraud detection. And with Coupa Pay, employees can be quickly reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses, without any dependency on payroll cycles.

But we’ve only just started unlocking the full value of T&E as a unified part of BSM.

Our vision is to unify full source-to-pay travel category management, making it effortless for customers to maximize T&E savings without needing to lift a finger. Imagine negotiating airline and hotel contracts, making those rates instantly available to your travelers, and auditing their usage over time — all from the same platform. Even better, what if Coupa could recommend what contracts you should negotiate by automatically analyzing your travel booking data? Magic!

These ideas and more are all possible as we further unlock the power of BSM for travel and expenses.

Amplifying T&E value with Community.ai

At Coupa, we share a belief: “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

We’ve used this philosophy to build a T&E solution that’s made more valuable with the collective knowledge and power of our entire customer community. Through the power of Coupa Community.ai, customers can measure their performance against critical program KPIs such as platform adoption, expense approval cycle time, and corporate card adoption rate and make improvements with intelligent prescriptions for recommended next steps.

Not only can customers learn from one another, but the collective power of our community’s spend actually enables more T&E savings. With Coupa Advantage travel rates, our customers have access to thousands of pre-negotiated private rates with rental car vendors, airlines, and hotels across the world, enabled by the group negotiating power of our customers’ collective spend. Best of all, these rates are all available directly in Coupa Travel.

Looking ahead

We’re thrilled to launch the new unified Coupa Travel & Expense today and thankful for the customers and partners whose feedback helped to shape this solution.

While this launch is a huge milestone, we’re committed to delivering more T&E value in every future release. We see so much opportunity to innovate in this category, and we invite you to join this journey with us.

Sources:

¹ "Booking Tools and Technologies," Skift, Jun 2019.