Travel, payment and expense platform TravelBank is adding a group travel management feature, with which admins can create events and manage attendance within a single workflow on TravelBank, the company announced.
The Group Travel feature lets users create events, send invitations, track RSVPs and arrange bookings within TravelBank, with employees also able to book flights and hotel room blocks within policy controls in the platform, TravelBank co-founder and CEO Duke Chung said. The feature includes embedded payment, leveraging TravelBank's ownership by U.S. Bank parent company U.S. Bancorp, which acquired TravelBank in 2021.
Guests not in the system can be invited by email to events, and they will be included in the tool's workflow, Chung said.
"When you look at a how a company manages all this today, it's extremely fragmented and very manual and requires a lot of different tools to bring together this event management process once things are negotiated and ready to go," he said. "We took the opportunity to think about, since we have the captive audience of company's employees, how we could centralize all this for the employees and finance teams, how we include the policy management, the booking flow and embedded payments as part of the process to make it extremely seamless."
The Group Travel feature currently is in beta with select clients, with wider availability for all TravelBank users projected for early 2026, Chung said. At its launch, the feature is designed to manage events up to 60 attendees, which Chung said covers a wide range of group needs for clients.
"We're seeing a lot of smaller events, like team events, and this is a perfect utility for that," he said. "You have a sales offsite, you have a product and engineering offsite, you have an HR and back office offsite. This is a very easy utility to turn on an manage across the business."
Chung added that TravelBank plans to add additional functionality that would support managing larger events, such as the approval processes that need to be in place for such events.