Today TravelPerk, one of the world’s fastest growing global travel management platforms, has announced the launch of its new and innovative open API-based travel platform.
In a major development for the travel management ecosystem, TravelPerk is making its services open to partners, customers, developers and other players in the travel sector through a simple, developer-friendly API. These will initially cover HR and expense management use cases, but with more services to be continuously added to the platform as it grows.
Founded in 2015, Barcelona-based TravelPerk has grown to 400+ employees in 5 years, and continues to be positive about the future of the business travel sector, as seen in our interview with co-founder Avi Meir last month. With today’s move, partners (like BambooHR, PayHawk and MobileXpense) will be able to access the TravelPerk platform, use the APIs to build new integrations, and list these apps on the TravelPerk marketplace, opening up new acquisition channels to market their products to existing and future customers. Overall, this shows that TravelPerk is taking an open and collaborative approach to working with partners, creating an ecosystem where everyone can find the provider that’s the best fit for them.
For TravelPerk customers, this brings further benefits. Businesses using TravelPerk will also be able to seamlessly and flexibly integrate TravelPerk’s tools directly into their internal corporate systems, such as existing HR or finance applications. By embedding these solutions into their workflows, customers can streamline and even automate many of the processes and operations they currently carry out manually when using TravelPerk, such as onboarding new users, expense management and financial reporting, and providing up to date safety information.
The platform is available to all existing TravelPerk customers, who will have access to every new integration and special offer introduced by Travelperk partners on the marketplace, as part of their bespoke plan. They will also have self-serve access to APIs on the platform, to get more out of their existing integrations.
Avi Meir, CEO and co-founder of TravelPerk, said: “The launch of the open TravelPerk platform is a new and inclusive approach to our future growth, and is part of our long-term mission to set new standards for business travel and deliver the best possible experiences to travelers and businesses. To date, most travel providers have only offered partner programs or “sold as seen” products on closed marketplaces. These are usually inflexible and accompanied by a cumbersome integration process. We wanted to go beyond that and empower other businesses to bring real innovation to the industry.
Ross McNairn, Chief Product Officer at TravelPerk, added: “We are putting developer experience at the center of this platform. Over the last few months we have worked very closely in a private beta with more than 20 partners and customers, from early stage startups to seasoned SaaS products, to ensure the best in-class developer experience. We are providing a fully fledged toolkit for developers, from the most curated developer hub and API documentation, to a sandbox environment to test their solutions for quality assurance. We do not see TravelPerk as a silo tool, but rather one that needs to coexist with hundreds of other SaaS tools. Our ultimate goal is for partners and developers to consider TravelPerk as the platform to build and grow with us. Easy to understand, easy to build, and easy to grow.”