Business Travel Management Company: What They Do and What They Cost

Hand the booking and the running of employee trips to someone outside your company, and let them own it. That is what a business travel management company sells, and the promise holds up. What makes it hard to shop for is that the same label covers three fairly different kinds of business, charging in four different ways. Some publish a price. Some quote one. And the published prices are not built on the same unit, so lining them up next to each other tells you very little.

I’m Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch. Most of my week goes to founders, CEOs and VPs at US companies between 20 and 300 people, which happens to be the size where business travel has become real work and nobody owns it yet. Almost nobody asks me who the best provider is. The question is what they are actually paying, and for which part of the job.

So here is the fee anatomy, with real published figures where they exist, then where Catch sits in it.

The Three Shapes a Business Travel Management Company Comes In

Everything sold under this label is one of three things. They differ less in what gets booked and more in who does the searching, and that is what drives the price.

1. The full-service agency

You contract with a firm and people there book for you. You email or call, they come back with options or a finished itinerary, they hold negotiated rates with hotels and airlines, and there is a human to reach when a flight gets cancelled at 11pm. For a company moving hundreds of travelers with duty-of-care obligations, that arrangement holds up well.

Agencies quote rather than publish, which is most of why this price is hard to find online. When you do ask for it, you are asking about four separate things, and each one is worth naming:

• A transaction fee on each booking, usually a different figure for a flight, a hotel and a rebooking.
• A subscription or management fee, charged monthly or annually for the relationship itself.
• A minimum volume commitment, the line that makes an agency expensive for a company with ten travelers rather than two hundred.
• Implementation, meaning the setup period before anyone can book, plus the internal owner who administers the account once it is running.

A quote that prices only one of those four does not tell you what the year will cost.

2. The self-serve booking platform

You buy software. Your travelers search and book inside it, within whatever policy you configure. This is the one category where real numbers get published, so it rewards a close read.

TravelPerk, which rebranded to Perk in November 2025, publishes travel-only plans for North America that pair a flat platform fee with a cut of each booking: Starter at $0 a month plus 5% per booking, Premium at $99 a month plus 3%, and Pro at $299 a month plus 3%. Its FlexiTravel option charges 10% per trip to guarantee an 80% refund on cancellations made up to two hours before departure.

Navan charges nothing for business travel booking and states that it is funded by travel providers’ commission fees. Expense is priced separately: free for the first 5 monthly expensing users, then $15 per user per month. The Enterprise tier is aimed at larger organizations, and that price is custom.

Concur publishes per-report pricing with unlimited users, roughly $7 per expense report on Base and roughly $11 on Plus, with Premium at custom pricing. One thing to know before it lands on your shortlist: Concur Travel appears only in the Premium tier, so the two self-serve tiers are expense products.

All three publish their prices, and the prices still do not compare. One takes a percentage of each booking, one charges per expensing user per month, one charges per expense report. Put those figures in adjacent columns and you will reach the wrong conclusion. Read the billing basis against how your company actually travels, then model each one on last year’s bookings.

3. The assistant who books for you

Someone else takes the trip and hands it back booked. You do not run the search, weigh the options, or sign off on your own itinerary. Executives with strong assistants have always had this, and it is the shape where none of the booking work sits with the executive at all.

The price here has always been a salary rather than a fee, which is why the shape stayed limited to people who could justify a full-time hire for a job where travel is one line among many.

The Fee That Never Appears on an Invoice

Every published model above is priced on a booking, a user or a report. Not one of them is priced on the time the trip takes to arrange.

That time is real, and it sits wherever your company puts it. Someone has to decide which flight fits the day, which hotel works for the morning, and what to do when both options are imperfect. In practice, plenty of executives hand that to an assistant rather than do it themselves. The booking fee shows up on the invoice, and the hour out of someone’s afternoon never does. That hour is the work Catch takes on.

Where Catch Fits

Corporate travel booking is in beta for selected Catch customers. It covers supported flights and hotels, with approval required before purchase. Fares, room charges, and supplier change or cancellation fees are separate from the $99 per person monthly subscription. Ask about availability and supported trip types before relying on it. See the travel beta.

Catch is the third shape, priced like software: a flat $99 per person per month, with no per-booking fee and no percentage of the ticket. It is an AI executive assistant that finds supported business flights and hotels for eligible beta customers and books only after approval. Corporate travel booking is available in beta to selected customers.

You tell it where you need to be and when, in Slack, by email, on WhatsApp or iMessage, in a voice note, or by talking to it on the phone. “I need to be in Chicago Tuesday through Thursday” starts the planning. Catch checks the details, finds supported options, and asks for approval before purchase.

Often it raises the trip before you do. Catch reads your calendar and inbox and picks up the trigger: a conference registration receipt, a meeting in another city, a flight sitting there with no hotel against it. The large savings in business travel come from booking early, and executives rarely book late on purpose. They book late because booking takes effort at a moment when nothing feels urgent.

What the $99 Covers

Catch is the booking party

For eligible beta customers, Catch can find and book supported flights and hotels after approval. Ground transport and other trip components depend on available integrations and may need separate arrangements.

The hotel is chosen against the meeting address

Right city and right location are not the same thing. Catch picks the hotel against where you actually have to be in the morning, which is the difference between a short walk and a cab in unfamiliar traffic.

The trip stays managed after it is booked

Catch keeps watching the booking. If a supported hotel rate drops, it can check whether a change saves money after fees and cancellation terms. Changes need your approval and depend on the supplier. If the trip moves, it can help review new options. You are not re-opening a booking tool to repair your own itinerary.

The calls a booking site cannot make

Some things only happen on the phone: confirming a room detail with the front desk, arranging late checkout, holding a table, booking a meeting room. Catch places those outbound calls on your behalf, included in the plan with no per-call fees. It identifies itself as an AI agent on calls. It does not answer your incoming calls, the same way a human assistant does not pick up your personal phone.

Your travel policy is the boundary

Share your travel policy, budget, and approval requirements so Catch can use them when proposing supported options. Confirm that the itinerary meets your company requirements before purchase. What Catch does not sell is a policy-and-spend-control console for your finance team to operate. The policy gets applied on the traveler’s behalf rather than enforced on them through an interface.

Preferences that accumulate

Catch learns how you travel from what you book and what you tell it. Airline, seat, flight times, hotel chain, room type, and the specific things you have objected to before. Say once that a hotel with no gym does not work for you, and it stops booking them. Early on, Catch checks with you before it books, and as it learns how you travel it handles more on its own.

What Catch Does Not Cover

Worth being straight about, because it decides whether Catch replaces your current provider or sits next to it:

• No expenses, receipts, reimbursement or spend reporting today. Catch books the trip; it does not administer the travel program. Expense handling is on our roadmap and not shipped yet, so plan around what the product does now.
• No finance-facing policy and spend console. If what you are buying is a dashboard for a travel manager to configure and police, that is a platform purchase, not this.
• Business travel only. Not leisure, not consumer trip planning.
• Nothing physical. Catch books and makes calls. It does not meet anyone, hand over documents or run an errand at the destination.

Who This Is For

• Founders, CEOs and VPs at US companies between 20 and 300 people who travel monthly with no travel manager in place.
• Executives who already have a booking platform and still forward every trip to someone else to operate it.
• Companies too small for an agency’s volume commitment and too busy for self-serve search.
• Teams where an assistant loses hours a week to flights and hotels and would rather put them into operational work.

How It Works

1. Connect Gmail or Outlook. Self-serve signup, under three minutes. No workflow builder, no configuration screens.
2. Say how you travel, or do not. State your preferences up front, or let Catch build them from your calendar and past trips.
3. Ask, or get asked. Tell Catch where you need to be, or wait for it to find the trip in your inbox and propose it first.
4. Approve. Check the supported flight and hotel options, total costs, and supplier terms before Catch purchases them.
5. Ask for help as plans change. Catch can review supported changes and call hotels with requests; purchases and changes remain subject to approval, availability, and supplier terms.

What It Costs

Catch is a flat $99 per person per month. No credit system, no usage tiers, no per-call fees, and outbound calls are included. There is a 10-day free trial.

For context, a fully loaded US executive assistant runs roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year. That is not an argument for letting anyone go. Catch covers the traditional administrative role, including calendar, inbox, scheduling, bookings and travel, and the person doing that work today can move into the operational and in-person responsibilities Catch does not touch. The other half of the comparison is availability. Catch is available outside business hours, including the hours and weeks when a person is asleep, on holiday or in a meeting.

On security, Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and CASA Tier 2 verified.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

The fee you can find is priced on a booking, a user or a report. The cost you cannot see is the hour someone spends searching, and that is the part Catch takes, for $99 per person a month.

Connect your calendar and inbox, hand Catch your next trip, and see what comes back booked.

Pricing sources

Primary sources for the pricing and service descriptions: TravelPerk, Navan, Concur. Annual billing, eligibility, usage allowances, and add-ons can change the total; confirm terms with the provider.