Navan

This app is well-designed and very human-user focused, in my opinion. Booking is easy, it retains all your information and makes finding flights, hotels, and cars easy. It sends reminders of your next event (check in for flight, pick up car at X counter, etc.) and makes those business trips where you hop from location to location and don’t know where you are or what day it is a breeze. I’ve even leveraged their human support and they were patient, friendly, and helpful. I used to beg my wife to book trips for me because it was such a hassle, and now with Navan I am finally able to be an adult and do it myself (but only because it’s so easy to use, even a child could do it). If everything were like Navan, the world would be a better place!

TripActions used to run this service and since they rebuilt the App for Navan is has been nothing but challenges. It took me over 2 hrs to book a simple hotel stay. The app seems to CONSTANTLY refresh the home page which makes it near impossible to click on a trip to view details in between flickering images, then crashes constantly when trying to select rooms. Lost count in my last experience as it was well over 10 attempts to search the hotel I knew I was going to stay in, select the room, and get through checkout. A ridiculous missing features… you cannot copy a hotel address to paste into your favorite navigation app! Why? At least let the user select which app to open instead of monopolizing Google Maps. Two stars for nice manager overview for team leaders and a clean overall look and feel so not a complete waste of phone memory. Also has some benefits for notifications and flight info. I tend to use the service provider apps for flights but Navan is about equal to theirs.

Our company shifted to TA earlier this year as a means of standardizing our business travel. Admittedly, I was a little hesitant at first, but soon realized that I can continue to leverage my loyalty programs and be rewarded with funds for personal use by helping reduce our travel budgets. What a novel idea, reward the employees who are driving lower costs. It’s almost become a game to see how much I can save (and earn). When weather impacted my travel earlier this year, I was stuck in a non-hub city to my preferred airline and actually booked on another. When the major airline essentially left me to fend for myself in a line that took more than two hours, TA held a seat for me on a rerouted itinerary, cancelled a rental car reservation and even contacted the hotel I was booked at in another city to cancel my reservation and ensure I received my deposit back. That was a level of service I’d expected from an elite loyalty desk, instead of a small business’ contracted app-driven travel partner. I’m glad TripActions is our choice partner for travel. I don’t ever want to change back to o e of the bigger groups. They’ve made a believer out of me and enabled me to “up my game” in delivering better service to my clients. Travel is solved.