Executive Travel Agency: Who Books for Senior Leaders

What an Executive Travel Agency Actually Is

An executive travel agency books and manages travel for a handful of senior people instead of for a whole company. The unit of work is one leader’s trip, and the service gets judged on one thing: did that leader land on time, rested, and in the right part of the city.

It is not corporate travel management in miniature. Corporate travel management exists to make thousands of trips consistent and auditable. Executive travel exists to make eight or ten trips go exactly right, including the parts no policy document has ever mentioned.

I’m Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch. Most of my week goes to CEOs, founders, and operations leaders at US mid-market companies, and the executive travel conversation barely changes from one to the next. Nobody owns the booking, so it lands on the person with the most expensive hour in the building, usually late at night.

Four Things That Make Executive Travel Different

These four properties explain why the self-serve booking tool that works fine for a 400-person sales team falls apart for the CEO.

Fewer trips, so nothing becomes routine

A sales rep takes thirty trips a year and settles into a rhythm. A CEO takes eight or ten, and no two are shaped alike: a board meeting, a keynote, a customer save, an investor roadshow. Each one gets assembled from scratch by someone who last did this two months ago.

Higher stakes per trip

A rep missing a connection costs a demo. A CEO missing a connection costs the board meeting the whole trip was built around. The downside sits in the meeting, not the fare, which is why executives happily pay for the flight that lands with room to spare.

The trip changes late

Executive calendars move more than anybody else’s, and they move last. A customer pushes Thursday to Friday. An investor adds a dinner. A deal closes and suddenly the Denver leg is pointless. Booking is the easy half; keeping a trip correct through four changes in nine days is the actual work.

Preferences that have to be remembered

Senior travelers collect specifics: the airline where the status sits, the aisle seat, the hotel with a properly equipped gym, the hard rule about not landing after 10pm. None of that is written down anywhere. It lives in somebody’s head, and the day they leave, it leaves with them.

How You Reach a Traditional Executive Travel Agency

The classic model is a named agent. You get a person, an email address, and a direct line, and over a year or two of trips that person learns your preferences. It works. Executive travel consultants who are good at this tend to keep their clients for a long time.

The limitation is access. A named agent is one person with a working day, other clients, and time off. When the trip changes at 11pm on a Sunday, you are either talking to an after-hours desk that has never heard of you, or you are doing it yourself.

A newer tier has grown up in that gap. Ascend, for instance, is a membership travel concierge reached through WhatsApp, staffed by human travel experts rather than a booking portal, with a commitment to respond inside a minute, 24 hours a day. It books flights, hotels, ground transport, and private aviation, monitors trips and rebooks proactively when they are disrupted, and it covers personal and family travel alongside business.

Then there are the booking platforms, which are a different shape of product again. Navan offers its business travel product free, funded by commission on bookings, and sells expense separately at $15 per user per month after the first five monthly expensing users. TravelPerk’s travel-only tiers in North America run $0 per month plus 5% per booking, $99 plus 3%, and $299 plus 3%. Both are company purchases with an approval step in the middle: Navan covers travel-policy approvals alongside expenses and receipts, and TravelPerk routes trip approvals to managers through Slack or Microsoft Teams.

What It Costs to Be a Named Client

Traditional agencies bill per transaction, on a retainer, or through a management fee, and the spread is wide enough that quoting one number would be misleading. The concierge tier does publish a figure: Ascend’s individual membership is $300 per month or $2,500 per year, with no routine booking, service, or change fees.

The other route companies take is hiring. A fully loaded US executive assistant runs roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year, and travel is one slice of what that person does.

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 an AI executive assistant that acts as the travel agent itself. For eligible beta customers, it finds supported flights and hotels, books after approval, and helps with supported changes. Ground transport may need separate arrangements. There is no dashboard and no search to run. You ask in whatever channel you already use: Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or voice. Often Catch raises the trip before you do, because it already saw it in your calendar and inbox.

Catch is $99 per person a month, flat, with voice included and no per-call fees. Travel is part of that subscription rather than a service bolted on beside it.

Travel is also only part of the job. The same assistant runs your calendar, works your email, books your meetings, flags what actually needs you, and places real phone calls on your behalf. Executive travel services have always been one piece of that role, not a product sitting off to the side.

Key Capabilities

Available outside business hours

Catch is available outside business hours. You can ask about a Sunday-night change without waiting for Monday. Completion depends on the task, available integrations, approvals, and suppliers.

The trip comes from your calendar and inbox

Catch reads the data you are already generating. A conference registration receipt arrives, or a Chicago meeting appears on the calendar, and Catch comes back with the usual flight and the usual hotel, waiting on a yes. The trip gets handled before it turns urgent, which is usually when executive travel is both cheaper and easier to arrange.

Preferences that accumulate without a form

There is no preference profile to fill in. Catch builds its picture of you from the connected calendar and email, plus every correction you hand it. Mention once that a hotel had no gym and hotels without gyms stop appearing. It leans on judgment rather than rigid rules, weighing what it knows about this particular trip instead of matching a template. Early on it checks with you before acting, and it earns more independence as it learns how you work.

Real phone calls for the last mile

Catch places outbound calls from its own line: confirming a room detail with the front desk, arranging late checkout, holding a 7pm table near the office you are visiting. It is built for one-to-one calls, not mass dialing, and it does not answer your incoming calls, much the same way a human assistant does not pick up your personal phone.

Still managed after it is booked

After booking, eligible beta customers can ask Catch to review supported flight and hotel changes. It checks availability, cancellation terms, and supplier fees before proposing a change, and asks for approval before purchase or rebooking. Ground transport may require separate arrangements.

Booked inside your travel policy

Share your travel policy, budget, and approval requirements so Catch can use them when proposing supported options. Confirm compliance before purchase; Catch does not replace a company travel-policy enforcement system. What Catch does not sell is a spend-control console for finance teams, which is a different product aimed at a different buyer.

What Catch Does Not Cover

• Expenses, receipts, and reimbursement. Catch books the trip. It does not file the expense report or capture receipts. That one is on our roadmap, not something we have ruled out.
• Leisure and family travel. Business travel only. The repetition in business trips is exactly what lets an assistant act with confidence.
• Anything physical or in person. Catch works over calls, messages, and bookings. Work that needs someone physically present is work a person does.

Who This Is For

• CEOs, founders, and C-suite leaders at US mid-market companies who fly the same routes and conferences over and over, and book those trips themselves
• Executives whose trips change after booking more often than they don’t
• Leaders who had a great assistant or agent, lost them, and lost the preference file along with them
• Executives who are still the one assembling the itinerary, however much travel tooling the company already has

How It Works

1. Sign up and connect Gmail or Outlook. Under three minutes, self-serve, no workflow builder to configure.
2. Talk to it wherever you already are. Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or a phone call, with continuity across all of them.
3. Catch reads context. Calendar, inbox, and connected tools hand it the trips, the relationships, and the patterns.
4. Hand over the first trip, or wait for Catch to raise it. Say where you need to be and when, or let it spot the trip and come back with options.
5. Give feedback once. Each correction sharpens the picture, so the next trip asks less of you.

Results You Can Expect

For eligible beta customers, Catch can reduce research and coordination around supported flights and hotels. Booking earlier can give you more options, though prices vary. When plans change, ask Catch to review supported alternatives, supplier terms, and fees before you approve a purchase.

What It Costs

$99 per person per month, flat. Voice calls are included with no per-call fees, there are no usage tiers or credits, and there is no higher plan waiting to be sold to you. The trial runs 10 days.

Put that next to a fully loaded US executive assistant at roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year and the gap is hard to miss. It is not an argument for letting anyone go. The traditional administrative layer, the booking, the triage, the scheduling, is genuinely covered now, and the person handling it today is usually the one you want on the operational and in-person work Catch cannot do at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

If you are booking your own flights at midnight, that is work you can hand off. Connect your calendar and inbox, give Catch the next trip, and review the options it comes back with.

Get Started with a 10-day trial, then $99 per person a month with travel beta for eligible customers.

Pricing sources

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