Revolutionizing Business Travel: Center’s New Strategic Partnership with Direct Travel

By Naveen Singh on April 2, 2024

On the heels of the integration of travel management into our core real-time expense solution, we dive further into the dynamic corporate travel landscape with Direct Travel.

Direct Travel selected Center to be a key pillar of its new modern integrated travel technology stack as the company embarks on a mission to set the global standard for The Perfect Trip. The new offering will bring together their AI innovations around client experience with Center’s card-first expense platform, along with Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform, and Troop’s group meetings and events platform. We are excited to contribute to this journey and help shape the future of business travel.

Today, Center’s card-first travel and expense offering addresses top middle-market pain points of cumbersome processes, lack of control and compliance, as well as high cost of ownership. Center is a single place for customers to administer and manage corporate cards, corporate travel, and all employee expenses. Our card-centric approach provides real-time visibility of employee spending, both on and off program travel spend, bringing unprecedented clarity over what has traditionally been a difficult cost to control.

We are committed to delivering expense technology that is deeply connected to the corporate card. By enabling enhanced controls and card management to be done within the application, we give finance teams confidence to distribute cards with less worry of spend leakage and compliance challenges. Coupled with automated policy guardrails, a consumer-grade travel booking experience, and first-class service and support—spenders and budget managers, travelers and travel managers, as well as finance teams gain modern expense tools that they use and love. Integrating our offering with Direct Travel’s best-in-class customer service will deliver a tech-forward travel experience that will be available to customers later this year.

Long-term, the Direct Travel Platform will include enhanced capabilities that enable new travel experiences. The modern technology stack including Center, Troop, and Spotnana presents a unique approach to integrating travel, expense management, and events, and will be designed for corporate travel leaders interested in providing this premium “Perfect Trip” experience to their employees.

“Like Center, we are completely aligned in our objective of bringing a tech-forward travel experience to market that aligns with middle-market companies focused on employee satisfaction and retention,” said Christal Bemont, CEO of Direct Travel. “The vision for bringing Center in as a strategic component of the Direct Travel Platform is to deliver a thoughtful, delightful travel experience in tandem with a seamless expense management process, for both employees and finance teams. We look forward to working together on creating the next frontier of corporate travel, prioritizing innovation that benefits our customers.”