- Lamp, an expense management company recently valued at $7.65 billion, is expanding into the business travel sector through a partnership with Booking Holdings Inc.’s Priceline.
- Ramp CEO Eric Glyman said nearly one in every five dollars spent on Ramp’s corporate cards is related to flights, hotels and travel entertainment.
- Corporate travel platforms often rely on high fees to guarantee control over where employees stay and which airlines they fly, something Priceline CEO Brett Keller called an “outdated business model.”
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Expense management company Lamp, recently valued at $7.65 billion, is expanding into the business travel sector through a deal with Booking Holdings Inc.’s Priceline, as corporate spending platforms increasingly look to retain and attract customers with extra services.
The new product, called Ramp Travel, leverages AI and automation to streamline and simplify the process of booking and expense travel, and Priceline will give Ramp users access to airlines, hotels and other travel inventory.
Ramp CEO Eric Griman said the company has seen a significant increase in businesses using cards and travel budgets on the platform, accounting for 20% of annual card spend, up from about 10% in 2021. This is what ultimately prompted Ramp to partner with Priceline and introduce new platform features.
“Almost one out of every five dollars spent on ramp cards is related to flights, hotels and travel-related entertainment,” Griman said. “This is a real way to bring all of that together.”
Lamp says that more than 25,000 companies currently use its platform.
Ramp, a two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company (ranked 32nd in 2024), is trying to differentiate itself from a growing number of expense management software vendors by not just tracking spending, but also flagging duplicate expenses and helping companies reduce them through contract negotiations. Griman said a similar management approach would be applied to business travel.
Both companies see an opportunity to take market share from corporate travel services, which often charge high fees to control where their employees stay and which airlines their travelers fly.
Priceline CEO Brett Keller described corporate travel as an “outdated business model” in which large companies negotiate directly with select suppliers and then charge higher prices because of the customer support and service they receive.
“Today’s travelers are much smarter and do most of the work themselves, so they deserve access to a wider range of inventory and better prices,” Keller said.
Travel is the latest feature Ramp has added in the last year, which also saw the rollout of Ramp Intelligence, which generates insights for finance teams and proactively suggests savings opportunities, and Ramp Plus, a new suite of services for enterprise clients such as Shopify.
The spend management space is becoming increasingly competitive, with other disruptive companies Brex, Navan, Expensify, Mesh Payments, Airbase and Center vying for market share alongside incumbents such as SAP’s Concur, making Ramp’s entry into the space critical to the company’s growth and continued disruption.
Griman said expansion into travel and other new services should help expand the client roster. Most of Ramp’s clients have never raised venture capital, but he said the average size of companies using the platform has more than doubled in the past three years.
“It’s not just deepening [Ramp] But it also allows us to serve new customers that we couldn’t serve before,” Griman said.
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