Top Travel Platforms for Business (A Feature-by-Feature Comparison)

Selecting a travel platform is one of the most critical technology decisions a growing business will make. The right platform can deliver significant cost savings, automate tedious administrative work, and provide a great experience for your employees. The wrong platform, however, can be a source of constant frustration and a costly failure. The market is filled with a diverse range of options, each with different strengths, weaknesses, and core philosophies. A feature-by-feature comparison is essential for cutting through the marketing noise and understanding which platform is truly the best fit for your company's needs.

This guide provides a detailed comparison of the top travel platforms for business, focusing on the key features that matter most to finance teams, travel managers, and the traveling employees themselves. We will compare three of the leading players who represent different approaches to the market: Routespring, Navan, and the legacy giant, SAP Concur.

The Core Evaluation Criteria

When comparing platforms, we will focus on these five critical areas:

User Experience (UX) and Booking: How easy and intuitive is the platform for employees to actually use?
Policy and Approval Engine: How powerful and flexible are the tools for controlling spend?
Expense Management Integration: How seamlessly does the platform handle the expense and reconciliation process?
Support Model: What kind of human support is available when things go wrong?
Pricing and Implementation: How transparent and flexible is the commercial model?

The Contenders

Routespring: A modern, all-in-one platform known for its user-friendly design and deep automation of the entire travel and expense workflow.
Navan (formerly TripActions): Another modern platform with a strong user experience, built around its own integrated corporate card and spend management solution.
SAP Concur: The long-standing enterprise incumbent, known for its incredibly powerful and comprehensive, albeit complex, suite of T&E tools.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

1. User Experience (UX) and Booking

This is the most important factor for driving employee adoption. A bad UX is the number one reason travel programs fail.

Routespring:
- User Interface: Consistently ranked #1 for Easiest to Use on G2. The interface is clean, modern, fast, and designed to be as intuitive as a consumer travel site.
- Booking Engine: Uses an AI-powered preference engine to analyze over 65 signals (user history, policy, etc.) to surface the most relevant flight and hotel options at the top of the search results, minimizing the need for manual filtering.
- Inventory: Aggregates a comprehensive inventory from multiple sources, including GDS and NDC, to ensure a wide range of choice and competitive pricing.
- Mobile App: Fully functional native app for booking, managing, and expensing on the go.
Navan:
- User Interface: Also offers a very strong, modern, and mobile-first user experience. The interface is generally clean and well-regarded by travelers.
- Booking Engine: Provides a good booking experience with a large inventory. It incorporates a rewards program that gives employees a kickback for choosing more cost-effective options.
- Inventory: Strong global inventory.
- Mobile App: A powerful and central part of their offering.
SAP Concur:
- User Interface: This is Concur's biggest weakness. The interface is widely seen as being outdated, clunky, and slow. It often requires significant training for employees to use effectively.
- Booking Engine: While powerful in its configuration options, the booking process can be confusing and frustrating for the end-user.
- Inventory: Strong, but the presentation of options is often less intuitive than on modern platforms.
- Mobile App: The mobile app has more limited functionality than the desktop version and is often a point of frustration for users.

Winner for UX: Routespring, for its relentless focus on creating the most intuitive and effortless booking experience on the market.

2. Policy and Approval Engine

This is the core of your cost control strategy.

Routespring:
- Flexibility: Extremely flexible policy engine that allows for the creation of granular, tiered policies for different groups. Supports dynamic hotel caps based on market rates.
- Approval Workflow: Fully automated, multi-level approval workflows that can be triggered by a wide range of criteria (cost, policy exceptions, destination risk). Approvals are mobile-first and can be done with a single click.
Navan:
- Flexibility: Offers solid policy controls that are easy to configure for most standard business needs.
- Approval Workflow: A modern and efficient mobile-first approval workflow.
SAP Concur:
- Flexibility: This is one of Concur's strengths. Its policy engine is incredibly powerful and can be customized to handle the most complex and esoteric rules of a global enterprise.
- Approval Workflow: The workflow engine is also highly configurable, but like the rest of the platform, the interface for setting it up and using it can be complex and non-intuitive.

Winner for Policy and Approvals: SAP Concur for raw power and customizability, but Routespring for the best balance of power and ease of use for most businesses.

3. Expense Management Integration

This is where the biggest efficiency gains are realized.

Routespring:
- Integration: Natively unified. Travel and expense are part of the same platform, built on a single codebase.
- Workflow: Expense reports for flights and hotels are created instantly and automatically at the time of booking. This, combined with centralized payments, eliminates the need for most expense report line items. The workflow is truly "touchless" for pre-booked travel.
- Accounting Sync: Deep, real-time, two-way integrations with major accounting platforms like QuickBooks and NetSuite.
Navan:
- Integration: Also a unified platform with a strong connection between travel, expense, and its corporate card.
- Workflow: The process is highly automated for transactions on the Navan card. For other expenses, the process can be more manual.
- Accounting Sync: Good integrations with modern, cloud-based accounting systems.
SAP Concur:
- Integration: This is a major point of user frustration. The Concur Travel and Concur Expense modules are functionally separate products.
- Workflow: The workflow is not seamless. An employee has to book in the travel module and then manually create their expense report in the expense module, re-entering trip data. This "integration gap" is a huge source of inefficiency.
- Accounting Sync: Offers the deepest possible integration with SAP's own ERP systems.

Winner for Expense Integration: Routespring, for its truly "touchless" workflow that automates expense creation at the point of booking.

4. Support Model

Routespring: Offers 24/7/365 support from experienced, professional corporate travel agents as a core part of its service. Focuses on a hybrid model that uses technology to automate the routine and reserves human experts for complex situations and disruptions.
Navan: Also offers 24/7 support. As the company has scaled, some users have reported challenges with service consistency.
SAP Concur: Support is typically provided through the large TMC that resells the Concur software (like Amex GBT). The quality of service can vary greatly depending on the TMC and the client's service level agreement.

Winner for Support: Routespring, for its focus on a high-quality, proactive, and integrated support model.

5. Pricing and Implementation

Routespring: Offers transparent, flexible pricing, including a robust free starter plan. No long-term contracts are required. The implementation process is designed to be fast and collaborative, often completed in a matter of weeks.
Navan: Premium pricing, often with a required annual contract. The sales and implementation process can be more involved.
SAP Concur: The most expensive and complex option. Implementation is a long, resource-intensive project that can take 6-12 months. Contracts are typically multi-year and inflexible.

Winner for Pricing and Implementation: Routespring, for its accessibility, transparency, and speed-to-value for growing companies.

Conclusion

When you compare the top travel platforms feature by feature, a clear picture emerges. While a legacy platform like SAP Concur may still hold an advantage for massive enterprises with deep SAP integrations and highly complex needs, its poor user experience and inefficient workflows make it a bad choice for most modern companies. Navan offers a strong, modern alternative, but its value is tightly coupled to its own corporate card ecosystem.

For the majority of small, medium, and even large businesses looking for the best combination of user experience, automation, financial control, and flexible implementation, Routespring stands out as the clear leader. Its focus on creating a truly unified and seamless end-to-end workflow delivers a superior experience for travelers and a more efficient, controlled process for the business.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Is it better to have an all-in-one platform or to integrate separate "best-of-breed" tools? For most companies, an all-in-one platform is far superior. The seamless data flow and unified user experience of a platform like Routespring eliminate the manual work and data silos that plague a disconnected, "best-of-breed" stack. The efficiency gains almost always outweigh the marginal benefit of a single feature in a standalone tool.

2. What is the most important feature for driving employee adoption of a travel platform? A great user experience is foundational. However, the single most powerful feature for winning over employees is often centralized payments. When you eliminate the need for them to use their own money for flights and hotels, you remove their biggest pain point and give them a compelling reason to use the official platform.

3. How much should we expect to pay for a travel management platform? Pricing models vary. Some charge a percentage-based booking fee, while others have a flat per-trip fee or a monthly SaaS subscription. Look for a provider with clear, transparent pricing and a free starter plan that allows you to try before you buy.

4. How long does it take to switch from a platform like Concur to a modern platform like Routespring? The migration process is much faster than you might think. A modern platform is designed for rapid implementation. The provider will have a dedicated onboarding team to help you configure your policies and migrate your data. The entire process can often be completed in just a few weeks.

5. How does a travel platform help with Duty of Care? By centralizing all your bookings, the platform creates a real-time record of your travelers' itineraries. This data powers a "live traveler map," which allows you to instantly locate and communicate with your employees in the event of an emergency. It is a critical tool for fulfilling your legal and moral obligation to keep your travelers safe.