Navan has launched a new multi-city booking engine that the company said enables travelers to self-service bookings of complex trips that previously required agent assistance.
Online booking tools typically have had trouble presenting options for multi-city trips to travelers, as each leg of a trip introduces another multiple of the thousands of route, carrier and fare combinations for the full trip. As such, it is "one of the hardest engineering challenges in travel," Navan VP of engineering Ian Fette said in a statement.
Navan's new multi-city capability, now available to business travel customers globally, integrates content across multiple sources, including New Distribution Capability sources, and presents them in an interface similar to Navan's interface for one-way and round-trip travel, the company said. Travelers can compare fare and cabin types across the journey and make combinations such as economy flights for short-haul legs and business class for long-haul legs.
"We rebuilt our multi-city engine from the ground up, aiming to make booking a five-leg international trip as straightforward as a one-way flight home," according to Fette.
The engine also includes a checkout where multiple bookings, even if across multiple carriers, can be made in a single transaction, Navan said. If it is unable to ticket one leg of the trip, the remainder of the itinerary is still processed, and travelers are given other options for the leg of the trip that was not ticketed.
Navan said it is working on adding "contextual booking guidance developed by Navan's top multi-city agents and AI-powered ticketing optimization" to the booking engine.