Navan Revolutionizes Multi-City Travel with Upgraded Booking Experience
Navan (NASDAQ: NAVN), the leading all-in-one platform for business travel, payments, and expense management, has unveiled its upgraded multi-city booking experience, designed to simplify even the most complex travel itineraries. By leveraging cutting-edge engineering and advanced algorithms, the new platform eliminates the need for travelers to rely on human agents for intricate trips, delivering speed, transparency, and reliability like never before.
For corporate travelers managing multi-leg journeys, this development represents a major breakthrough in efficiency, cost control, and overall travel experience.
The Challenge of Multi-City Travel
Booking multi-city trips has historically been a significant engineering challenge. Unlike simple one-way or round-trip flights, multi-city itineraries involve numerous variables: multiple routes, different carriers, varying fares, time zones, and connection constraints. Each added leg increases the number of possible combinations exponentially, quickly overwhelming legacy travel tools.
Older systems, primarily designed for single-leg bookings, often force travelers to book via phone or email, paying higher fees and sometimes straying outside company policies. The results are clear: lost time, increased costs, and reduced visibility for travel managers and finance teams.
Recognizing this problem, Navan undertook a complete rebuild of its multi-city booking engine, integrating modern content sources and advanced algorithms to deliver a seamless, reliable, and intuitive experience.
The Navan Multi-City Engine: Bringing Travel Agent Expertise to Technology
At the core of the new system is a powerful algorithm that functions like a seasoned travel agent, analyzing thousands of variables to present travelers with the optimal itinerary. Key features of the new engine include:
- Integration with New Distribution Capability (NDC): Ensures broader content coverage and access to better pricing, allowing travelers to see options that legacy platforms often miss.
- Fare Transparency: Every flight is broken down by fare type, amenities, and cabin class, helping travelers make informed decisions about comfort, cost, and efficiency.
- Multi-Ticket Reliability: Even when booking across multiple carriers, the platform handles checkouts smoothly, ensuring failed legs do not derail the entire itinerary.
Multi-city booking is one of the hardest engineering challenges in travel, which is why legacy T&E platforms haven’t been able to offer it,” said Ian Fette, Vice President of Engineering at Navan. “We rebuilt our multi-city engine from the ground up, aiming to make booking a five-leg international trip as straightforward as a one-way flight home.
This approach empowers travelers to create sophisticated itineraries in minutes rather than hours, all while staying compliant with company travel policies.
Intuitive, User-Centered Design
A critical component of Navan’s upgrade is its Next Generation Storefront interface, which mirrors the simplicity and usability of its one-way and round-trip booking flows. Travelers encounter familiar visual cues and guidance, minimizing the learning curve even when managing multi-leg journeys across continents.
- Visual Consistency: Users navigating complex trips encounter the same streamlined experience as with simpler bookings.
- Guided Decision-Making: Recommendations and prompts guide travelers in selecting optimal flights and combinations, ensuring they do not overlook opportunities for savings or convenience.
This focus on user experience transforms the booking process from a tedious task into a fast, intuitive workflow, allowing business travelers to focus on their objectives rather than logistics.
Expanded Inventory and Smarter Pricing
A major advantage of Navan’s upgraded platform is its ability to surface options that other systems miss. By integrating NDC and other modern content sources, travelers gain access to a broader range of routes, pricing, and fare types, increasing the likelihood of finding cost-effective and convenient travel options.
- Better Price Discovery: Expanded inventory often reveals lower fares or alternative routing options unavailable on legacy platforms.
- Flexibility in Cabin Classes: Users can mix and match economy and business class legs, optimizing for comfort and price without sacrificing control.
This expanded visibility not only reduces travel costs but also enhances overall travel planning efficiency, allowing managers to approve itineraries faster and more confidently.
Reliable Ticketing Across Multiple Legs
Booking multiple tickets simultaneously has long been a source of frustration for corporate travelers. Navan’s revamped checkout process ensures that even if one segment fails to ticket, the remaining legs of the trip continue to process, providing alternative solutions for the failed portion.
This reliability is especially critical for multi-carrier itineraries or international trips with multiple layovers, where ticketing errors can result in delays, increased costs, or missed connections. By removing this friction, Navan reduces stress for travelers and administrative teams alike, improving both employee satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Transparency, Optimization, and Cost Control
Beyond usability, the new multi-city experience emphasizes fare transparency and optimization. Travelers can see full fare details, compare amenities, and make informed choices about the trade-offs between price, time, and comfort. This level of detail is invaluable for business travel programs where budget adherence and employee comfort must coexist.
Future updates promise even more advanced capabilities, including:
- Contextual Booking Guidance: AI-driven recommendations based on historical travel patterns and preferences.
- Automated Ticketing Optimization: Systems that automatically identify the best routing combinations for savings and convenience.
These innovations will continue to position Navan at the forefront of corporate travel technology, making it easier than ever for companies to manage complex itineraries efficiently.
Global Availability for Business Travel Customers
The upgraded multi-city booking functionality is now available to all Navan business travel customers worldwide. Its combination of ease-of-use, expanded inventory, AI-driven optimization, and reliable multi-ticketing addresses long-standing pain points in corporate travel, helping companies streamline operations while ensuring travelers enjoy the best possible experience.
This release underscores Navan’s commitment to continuous innovation in travel technology, providing corporate clients with tools that save time, reduce costs, and improve overall travel program compliance.
Navan’s upgraded multi-city booking experience represents a major advancement in corporate travel management. By addressing the most complex booking challenges with an intuitive interface, AI-driven insights, and expanded content integration, Navan empowers both travelers and travel managers to achieve optimal outcomes.
For business travelers, the platform simplifies itinerary planning, reduces stress, and increases transparency. For travel managers and finance teams, it provides visibility, cost control, and compliance enforcement. Combined, these benefits position Navan as a key partner in modern business travel, helping organizations navigate the increasingly complex landscape of multi-leg and international travel with confidence.
With this launch, Navan has effectively redefined multi-city travel, making it possible to book intricate, global itineraries as easily as a domestic one-way trip—a transformative development for corporate travel worldwide.
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