Europe’s leader in spend management brings access to corporate travel, at no additional charge, into its core platform to help SMBs manage their largest expense category.
Spendesk, the AI-powered spend management and procurement platform, announced its entry into corporate travel. Spendesk Travel brings access to travel booking, payment, and budgeting directly into the Spendesk platform at no additional charge for customers, unifying a category that finance teams have long managed in separate tools.
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Finance teams face mounting pressure to deliver comprehensive reporting while operating fragmented systems. A recent CFO Connect study highlights this challenge: 61% of companies still rely on Excel as their primary FP&A tool, and 10% have no planning system at all. With 75% of CFOs now responsible for enterprise-wide data and analytics, Gartner’s 2025 research names “metrics, analytics, and reporting” as their top priority.
Travel compounds this. It is the fastest-growing spend category, with Amadeus reporting a 30% year-on-year rise in domestic hotel bookings across Europe, yet it often sits outside corporate spend policies and budget monitoring, making control and reconciliation difficult.
Spendesk Travel challenges the outdated notion that travel should be managed separately from other areas of company spend. As one of the largest spend categories, travel is intrinsically linked to how businesses manage budgets, policies, and payments. Instead of adding another specialized tool, Spendesk extends the same unified spend management platform, covering cards, expenses, procurement, and accounts payable, to include travel. This integrated approach not only removes long-standing operational silos but ensures that travel operates within the same policies and controls that define a company’s overall spend strategy.
- Budget and policy upfront: Requestors see in-policy options, and approvers review choices against existing budgets. Travel is booked, approved, and tracked in the same platform – no need to recreate rules or risk misaligned policies between multiple tools.
- Full trip visibility: Travel booking and in-destination spend are finally connected within the same workflows and policies, eliminating silos and flowing seamlessly into reconciliation and close.
“As the top spend category for Spendesk customers, travel is often finance’s biggest blind spot. When travel is booked inside Spendesk’s platform, every trip begins as a budget decision, not a browsing session. Managers see the cash impact before approval. Employees don’t have to learn a new tool; they book where they already spend, with policy quietly guiding their choices. Keeping travel inside our customer’s existing spend workflow means consistent rules applied at the moment of booking and automatic linking of receipts, VAT codes, and other payments from the trip.” commented Becky Dutta, VP Customer Success at Spendesk.
For organisations, this expansion delivers practical outcomes for finance teams: faster month‑end, stronger policy adherence, fewer exceptions and manual checks, and a consolidated toolset. For travelers and managers, it means clearer guidance, fewer out‑of‑pocket expenses and one approval with full context.
“We built Spendesk on a simple belief: technology should liberate people so they can focus on what matters most. It’s with this belief that we have continued to take the position of expanding the Spendesk platform. Following the launch of our Procure-to-Pay solution in 2024 – making Spendesk the first European platform to fully integrate procurement and spend management for mid-market businesses – the next logical step became clear. While digital travel management has optimised booking processes, keeping travel separate from Finance operations has created persistent challenges around control, visibility, and operational efficiency. We truly believe that travel should be part of the finance operating system, not adjacent to it, which is also why we are offering access to this at no additional charge for our customers. Spendesk Travel connects the decision, the payment and the audit trail in one place, bringing travel into the same governed flow where the budget decision, the payment and the record live together, end‑to‑end,” said Rodolphe Ardant, Founder & President of Spendesk.
Looking ahead, Spendesk Travel represents the foundation for a broader AI-driven vision. The company’s AI roadmap will bring first-of-their-kind spend agents that proactively optimise travel purchases, surface cost-saving opportunities, and provide predictive insights to help finance teams spend smarter. These capabilities will support the emerging category of Spend Planning & Analysis, transforming travel from a reactive expense into a strategic, data‑driven function that anticipates needs and optimises outcomes automatically.
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