Emburse Adds Flight and Hotel Rebooking Capabilities With Tripbam Acquisition

Travel and expense management firm Emburse has acquired Tripbam.

Tripbam provides fully automated, always-on auditing technology to track and review corporate travel pre-trip spending, corporate negotiated discounts and supplier contracts, the companies said in a Wednesday (July 19) press release.

The acquisition of Tripbam gives Emburse’s customers the ability to add flight and hotel rebooking to the T&E process, according to the press release.

“I’m excited about this acquisition because our combined solution puts the power of automation, AI [artificial intelligence] and data in the hands of our customers so that they can focus on their business instead of the busywork of trying to manage spend manually,” Emburse CEO Eric Friedrichsen said in the release. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

As employee travel picks up after the pandemic, businesses are seeing a need to manage their travel costs, Friedrichsen said in the release. Tripbam enables companies to do that with its technology that constantly tracks and compares current prices with customers’ travel reservations and automatically rebooks a flight or hotel room if a lower price is available.

This technology has already tracked more than 30 million corporate travel bookings so far, representing over $30 billion in spending, according to the press release. On top of this, it has also helped more than 2,000 customers save $500 million.

“When looking for the best way to help bring Tripbam to the next stage of its journey, we knew that we needed to join an organization that has a strong track record of global growth and could support the world’s biggest brands,” Tripbam CEO and Founder Steve Reynolds said in the release. “In Emburse, we found a similarly entrepreneurial, customer-centric organization that is challenging the status quo with new ways of thinking and a great suite of products.”

AI can be transformative in the spend management space, helping firms to better understand spend at a more granular level, Emburse Chief Revenue Officer Jamie Anderson told PYMNTS in an interview posted in March.

“AI and machine learning (ML) are the next frontier of [spend management] — whether it’s about helping companies build policies, or just getting the insight to make predictions on future spend or savings,” Anderson said.