TravelPerk is one of the world’s fastest-growing global travel management platforms in the world. Founded in 2015 by Avi Meir, Javier Suarez, and Ron Levin, the Spanish startup is an all-in-one platform for booking business travel. The company has grown to over 400 employees in just five years and continues to be optimistic about the business travel sector’s future.
TravelPerk has recently revealed the launch of its open API-based platform. This new platform will allow its customers and partners to develop custom integrations and apps. The simple, developer-friendly API is a significant development for the travel management ecosystem. Its current offerings cover HR and expense management use cases, but more services will be added to the platform as it grows.
In June, the company acquired Albatross, an API for virus-related travel restrictions, to expand its risk management offering. “Applications we’ve seen being built on the platform already include HR functionality (think BambooHR), expense management systems, company payment cards, financial reporting, and ERP,” said Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Avi Meir.
Chief Product Officer at TravelPerk, Ross McNairn, also added that TravelPerk isn’t intended to be used as a “silo tool, but rather one that needs to coexist with hundreds of other SaaS tools.” The company’s ultimate goal is for more developers and partners to consider TravelPerk as the platform to build with.
There were two factors Meir considered when returning to the API: customer demand and culture. Not only is there a huge demand for a platform like this, but the startup has always had a philosophy of being “open, collaborative, and innovative,” which lends itself to an open API platform.
Businesses that use TravelPerk will also be able to integrate the company’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 automate many of the processes and operations they do manually with TravelPerk. This includes onboarding new users, expense management, financial reporting, and providing up-to-date safety information.
The platform is available to all existing TravelPerk customers, and customers will also have access to every new integration and special offer introduced by TravelPerk partners on the marketplace. Customers will also have self-serve access to APIs on the platform to get more out of their existing integrations.
