Expedia’s Egencia Enables Data Sharing Across T&E Platforms

Travel booking platform Expedia has expanded its focus to include corporate travel in recent years, but the company’s latest announcement signals a renewed effort to strengthen its B2B position.

Expedia detailed news on Monday (July 17) that its Egencia unit has launched. First announced in February, Egencia is a corporate expense management solution. The industry is a saturated one, but Egencia said it differentiates itself by providing a streamlined service to business users.

“Even for those using expense solutions, the task is complicated with multiple windows or log-ins — a separate one for the travel management tool, credit card account and expense solution,” the company said in its announcement. “To solve this, Egencia Integrated Travel and Expense [T&E] uses one log-in and one data source for everything.”

In announcing its launch, Egencia also revealed its first partner, Chrome River, to offer Egencia’s services.

“Many of our customers have travelers using our solution around the globe. Working with Egencia allows us to extend the same great experience to all our customers throughout the travel booking and expense process, no matter where they are in the world,” said Chrome River CEO Alan Rich in a statement.

In addition to its T&E management offering, Egencia also rolled out its Open Connect Platform, a way to facilitate data sharing between expense management solution providers. So far, Chrome River, Microsoft, Coupa and Expensify are among the 30 partners signed on to the data sharing tool.

“The difference between a good travel program and a great one is choice,” said Egencia President Rob Greyber in a statement. “We designed an open solution to let our customers choose the expense management tool they want. Then we improve on that by giving users access directly from the Egencia platform — turning the chore of filing expenses into a simple click of a button.

“The result is seamless,” he continued. “Users can have an expense system and a travel solution all in one place. The market reaction is very positive, and we are happy that so many partners have joined us already.”