The Short Version
Navan and Catch both produce the same end result for a business trip: flights and hotels booked. What happens before that, and who each product was built for, is where they separate.
Navan is a corporate travel and expense management platform. Booking, expense capture, policy, and corporate cards sit together in one system, which is why the buyer is usually finance and the operator is usually the traveler. Someone opens the platform, searches a global inventory of flights, hotels, car rentals, and trains, and picks an itinerary while company policy guides what counts as a compliant choice. Card transactions and receipts land in the same system and get reconciled from there.
Catch is an AI Executive Assistant, and business travel is one part of the role it covers. There is no travel dashboard and nothing to search. A conference confirmation lands in the inbox, or an out-of-town meeting appears on the calendar, and Catch comes back with the trip ready to book. Sometimes the request runs the other way, in a message: “Chicago, Tuesday to Thursday.” Catch books the flights, hotels, and ground transport as the travel agent itself, within the company’s travel policy, then keeps managing the trip until the return leg is done.
Which one fits comes down to the job in front of you rather than the length of a feature list. A company that needs visibility and control over what everyone spends on travel is looking at a platform, and Navan covers expense management and spend control that Catch does not do today. An executive who wants trips to stop being their own admin problem is looking at an assistant.
At a Glance
| Catch | Navan | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | AI Executive Assistant; business travel is part of the full admin role | Corporate travel and expense management platform, combining travel booking, expense management, and corporate cards in one system |
| Primary buyer | The executive whose admin work needs handling | Finance teams, travel administrators, and frequent business travelers running a structured corporate travel program |
| How a trip starts | You ask in any channel, or Catch offers the trip first from your calendar and email context | Navan’s materials describe travelers searching the travel inventory in its application or web dashboard |
| What gets booked | Flights, hotels, and ground transport, booked end to end by Catch | Flights, hotels, car rentals, and trains, searched and booked inside the platform |
| Autonomous booking | Catch books on your behalf; early on it checks first, and handles more independently as it learns you | Ava, Navan’s agentic AI, can autonomously book, modify, and cancel travel without manual confirmation |
| After the booking | Catch keeps managing the trip: watching for a better rate and rebooking where the booking is flexible, arranging last-mile details, calling the hotel, rebuilding the itinerary when the meeting moves | The Waiver Agent monitors airline waivers in real time and proactively alerts travelers to rebook before they get stranded |
| Learned preferences | Catch carries your travel preferences forward from connected data and your feedback, across all your admin work | The AI hotel concierge learns traveler preferences such as amenities, room size, and loyalty programs, and curates compliant hotel selections |
| Travel policy | Catch books within your company’s travel policy; it does not enforce policy or run approvals | Ava can compare spend against policy for finance managers |
| Expenses and reimbursement | Not covered today | Covered: receipt scanning and automatic transaction categorization |
| Corporate cards | Not part of the product | Navan issues its own corporate cards with up to 1.5% back, and Navan Connect links existing Visa, Mastercard, and American Express corporate cards for automatic reconciliation |
| Where you interact with it | Slack, email, text message, iMessage, and phone | Navan’s materials describe a dedicated application or web dashboard, plus an AI chat assistant for support and rebooking |
| Scope beyond travel | Inbox triage and replies, calendar and scheduling, reminders, reservations, and real outbound phone calls | Expense management, corporate cards, spend analysis, and 30+ HRIS integrations |
| Pricing | Flat $99/month, everything included, no per-call fees | Travel booking carries no fee on the Business tier, funded by travel providers’ commissions; expense management is free for the first 5 monthly expensing users, then $15 per active user per month |
Platform Overview
Catch
Catch is an AI Executive Assistant built to take the administrative role off an executive’s plate and finish it, instead of handing back a stack of drafts to approve. It connects to Gmail or Outlook and works from the calendar and inbox it can see. You reach it wherever you already work: Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or a phone call.
Business travel booking went live in July 2026. Catch books flights, hotels, and ground transport itself, acting as the travel agent rather than a search interface. Preferences carry forward, so airline, seat, hotel class, and whatever caused a problem on the last trip do not need restating every time. Booking happens inside the company’s travel policy, including rates and authorized upgrades.
What separates an assistant from a booking flow shows up after the confirmation email arrives. Catch keeps watching the trip. It looks for a better rate, and where the booking is on a flexible rate it cancels and rebooks. It handles the last mile that a booking tool hands back to the traveler: a hotel within walking distance of the actual meeting address, a call to the front desk about a room requirement or late checkout. If the meeting that caused the trip moves, Catch rebuilds the itinerary around it.
Travel is one part of a wider job. The same assistant triages the inbox, drafts and sends email to the executive’s intent, chases quiet threads that matter, resolves calendar conflicts by contacting the other side, books scheduling rather than just sending a link, surfaces reminders and flags what needs attention, makes reservations, and places real outbound calls to hotels, restaurants, and offices with no per-call fees. Its picture of the executive comes from connected data and from ongoing feedback, and it applies judgment rather than a rule table. Autonomy is earned: early on Catch checks before acting, and handles more on its own as it learns how the executive works. It verifies details before doing things on someone’s behalf.
Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and CASA Tier 2 verified. Two limits are worth stating plainly for this comparison. The product is built for business travel rather than consumer trip planning, and it does not currently cover expenses, receipts, reimbursement, or travel-policy enforcement and approvals.
Navan
Navan is a corporate travel and expense management platform. It brings the booking of business travel together with automated expense tracking, policy, and reimbursement in one system. Companies buy it to replace fragmented travel arrangements and manual expense reports with a single end-to-end workflow.
The workflow starts in the platform. A user searches and books from a global inventory covering flights, hotels, car rentals, and trains, with company policy applied dynamically to guide compliant choices. When a booking is made or a linked corporate card is used, the transaction is captured and categorized automatically. Employees photograph receipts for out-of-pocket expenses, those route to managers for approval, and approved expenses and travel data are reconciled for the month-end close. Employees and traveling team members work through a dedicated application or web dashboard, where they get itinerary updates, proactive disruption alerts, and an AI chat assistant for support and rebooking.
Navan’s product includes several agentic AI features. Ava can autonomously book, modify, and cancel travel without manual confirmation. Its AI hotel concierge uses a multimodal approach to learn traveler preferences such as amenities, room size, and loyalty programs, then curates compliant hotel selections. The Waiver Agent monitors airline waivers in real time to alert travelers to rebook before they are stranded. For finance managers, Ava acts as a data analyst, summarizing spend by category, comparing spend against policy, and predicting future travel habits.
On the money side, Navan issues its own corporate cards offering up to 1.5% back, and Navan Connect links existing Visa, Mastercard, or American Express corporate cards for automatic reconciliation. It supports 30+ HRIS integrations. Navan Rewards gives employees personal travel credit when they book under budget.
Core Features Compared
The booking model
Catch There is no interface for the executive to open and no inventory to search through. A trip is one sentence in whatever channel the executive is already using. Often there is no request at all, because Catch got there first after reading the conference registration in the inbox or spotting the offsite on the calendar. Catch is the booking party and completes the reservation itself, so the search work never lands on a person.
Navan Booking runs through the platform. The traveler searches the global inventory, with policy shaping what counts as compliant. That structure is what gives a finance team confidence, because every trip is created inside a system that already knows the rules. Ava can also take the booking, modification, or cancellation without manual confirmation. Either way, the trip is created and managed inside the travel platform, which is what keeps a company’s travel program auditable in one place.
Where the request comes from
Catch From context, not from a form. Catch works from the executive’s calendar and email, so it can raise the trip before anyone thinks to ask for it. It can also be reached on Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or the phone, which is how the rest of a trip tends to get handed off by voice between meetings.
Navan Navan’s published materials describe travelers working through its application or web dashboard, with an AI chat assistant on hand for support and itinerary rebooking. Employees are asked to create user accounts to reach the booking tools and submit expenses, and that structure is what lets a company keep everyone’s travel inside one auditable program.
Travel policy and compliance
Navan: Policy is a first-class part of the product. It is applied during search to guide compliant choices, hotel selections are curated against it, receipts route to managers for approval, and Ava can compare spend to policy on demand for finance leaders. A company that needs travel governed and reported at the program level is buying a platform for exactly this.
Catch: Catch books within a company’s travel policy without asking the executive to operate a compliance system to get there. It does not enforce policy, run an approval chain, or produce policy reporting. The difference is who does the work of staying inside the rules. On a platform, the traveler navigates the policy. With an assistant, the policy is simply how the trip gets booked.
Expenses and spend control
Navan: This is real ground Navan covers and Catch does not. Receipt scanning, automatic transaction categorization, manager approval routing, native corporate cards with up to 1.5% back, and Navan Connect for reconciling existing Visa, Mastercard, and Amex corporate cards. If the problem is that finance cannot see or control company-wide travel and expense activity, this is the product built for it.
Catch: No expenses, no T&E, no receipts, no reimbursement today. When the finance side of travel is the problem in front of you, Navan covers it and Catch does not. Plenty of companies run both: an expense system stays with finance, while Catch takes the booking and the trip management off the people who travel most.
After the trip is booked
Navan: Navan monitors disruption actively. The Waiver Agent watches airline waivers in real time and prompts travelers to rebook before they are stranded, and Ava can execute the change. For travelers who fly often enough to hit weather and cancellations regularly, that is meaningful cover.
Catch: Catch’s after-care sits at the executive-assistant layer rather than the disruption layer, and it runs whether or not anything has gone wrong. It watches the reservation for a better rate and, where the booking is flexible, rebooks when it finds one, arranges the last-mile details around the trip, calls the hotel about a room requirement or a late checkout, and rebuilds the itinerary when the meeting that caused the trip moves. That is the part of travel that usually returns to the executive, and it is handled by the same assistant that already knows why the trip exists.
Scope beyond travel
Catch Travel is one thread in a much larger job. The same assistant works the inbox, the calendar, scheduling and rescheduling, reminders and meeting prep, reservations, real outbound phone calls, CRM updates in HubSpot and Zoho, and task actions in Asana and Notion. No separate travel tool, no separate login, because the trip is booked by the assistant that already runs the schedule it has to fit into.
Navan Navan’s scope runs the other direction, deeper into the finance stack: expense management, corporate cards, spend analysis for finance leaders, and 30+ HRIS integrations. For a company standardizing a travel program, that depth is what it is buying.
Pricing Comparison
Catch Pricing
Catch is a flat $99/month. Email, calendar, scheduling, reminders, reservations, outbound phone calls, and business travel booking are all included. No credit system, no usage tiers, no per-call fees, nothing added on top of a booking. Signup is self-serve, with a 10-day free trial.
The number worth setting beside that is what the same work costs when a person does it. A fully loaded US executive assistant runs roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year. Catch handles the traditional executive-assistant role at $99 a month, around the clock, responding in seconds rather than hours.
None of which is an argument for letting anyone go. Once the admin layer is handled, the person in that seat moves into the work Catch does not cover: operational ownership, in-person responsibilities, and the relationship work that needs a human in the room.
Navan Pricing
Navan prices travel and expense separately. On the Business tier, travel booking carries no booking fee, and Navan states this is possible because it is funded by travel providers’ commission fees. Expense management is priced on its own: free for the first 5 monthly expensing users, then $15 per active user per month. Navan’s Enterprise tier is aimed at large-scale organizations and adds dedicated support and corporate negotiated rates, at custom pricing that is not publicly disclosed.
The two shapes are worth reading side by side. Navan’s cost scales with how many people are expensing, which makes sense for a company standardizing travel and expense across everyone who travels, and the travel side genuinely carries no booking fee. Catch’s $99 does not move with headcount, bookings, or call volume, and it buys the inbox, the calendar, the scheduling, the reservations, and the phone calls alongside the trip.
Who Should Choose Which?
Choose Catch if you want:
- Trips booked without anyone opening a search interface, and often offered up from your calendar and email before you ask
- Flights, hotels, and ground transport booked end to end by the assistant itself, inside your company’s travel policy
- The trip actively managed after booking: rebooking on a better rate where the booking is flexible, last-mile details, calls to the hotel, a rebuilt itinerary when the meeting moves
- Travel preferences learned once and applied from then on
- The rest of the admin role covered by the same assistant, from inbox and calendar to scheduling, reminders, reservations, and real outbound calls
- To hand work off from Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or a phone call
- One flat $99/month with no per-call fees
Choose Navan if:
- Expense management, receipt capture, and reimbursement need to sit in the same system as the booking
- Corporate cards, company-wide spend analysis, and policy reporting for finance leaders
- Travel governed at the program level, with company policy guiding compliant choices during booking
- A structured travel program where travelers or administrators search and book inside a platform
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Navan or Catch?
For an executive who wants business travel to stop being their own admin work, Catch is the better choice. It books flights, hotels, and ground transport from calendar and email context, within company travel policy, and keeps managing the trip afterwards, for a flat $99/month. Navan fits a different job: a finance team that needs expense management, corporate cards, and company-wide spend control tied to travel booking.
Is Catch a Navan alternative?
For the booking and trip-management half, yes. Catch removes the searching and assembling entirely, because it is the travel agent rather than a platform to search. It does not replace Navan’s expense management, corporate cards, or spend reporting, none of which Catch covers today.
Does Catch handle expenses, receipts, and reimbursement?
No. Catch books business travel and manages the trip. Expenses, T&E, receipts, and reimbursement are not part of the product today, and neither is travel-policy enforcement or approvals. Companies that need that side covered usually keep an expense system running alongside Catch.
Does Catch follow our company travel policy?
Yes. Catch books within a company’s travel policy, including rates and authorized upgrades. What it does not do is enforce that policy or run an approval workflow, which is the governance layer Navan sells to finance teams.
How much does Navan cost compared to Catch?
On Navan’s Business tier, travel booking carries no booking fee, funded by travel providers’ commissions, while expense management is free for the first 5 monthly expensing users and then $15 per active user per month. The Enterprise tier, aimed at large-scale organizations, is custom priced and not publicly disclosed. Catch is a flat $99/month covering travel booking plus email, calendar, scheduling, reservations, and phone calls, with no per-call fees.
What is Ava?
Ava is Navan’s agentic AI. It can autonomously book, modify, and cancel travel without manual confirmation. Ava also acts as a data analyst for finance managers, summarizing spend by category, comparing spend to policy, and predicting future travel habits.
Do I have to search for flights myself with Catch?
No, and there is nothing to search in. The request goes to Catch in Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or by phone. Or Catch raises the trip first, after spotting a conference confirmation in the inbox or an out-of-town meeting on the calendar. Then it books directly.
What happens after Catch books a trip?
It keeps managing it. Catch watches for a better rate and, where the booking is on a flexible rate, cancels and rebooks, arranges last-mile details such as a hotel within walking distance of the meeting, calls the front desk about room requirements or late checkout, and rebuilds the itinerary when the trip moves.
Can Catch make phone calls on my behalf?
Yes. Catch places outbound calls to hotels, restaurants, and offices, and you can call Catch directly to hand off work. It does not answer your personal phone or screen your incoming calls. Calls are included in the flat $99/month, with no per-call fees.
What kind of travel is Catch built for?
Business travel only. Work trips repeat, and that repetition is what lets an assistant book confidently from learned preferences. Catch is not built for leisure or consumer trip planning.
Can Catch replace a human executive assistant?
Yes. Catch covers the traditional executive-assistant role in full: calendar, inbox, scheduling, reminders, reservations, real calls, and business travel, at $99/month against roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year for a fully loaded US hire. Nobody needs to be let go over it. The person in that seat grows into the operational and in-person work Catch does not cover.
Can Catch and Navan be used together?
Yes, and for some companies that is the practical setup. Finance keeps a travel and expense platform for cards, reconciliation, and spend reporting, while Catch takes booking and trip management off the executives who travel most, so nobody on that side has to assemble a trip again.
Is Catch secure enough for executive data?
Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and CASA Tier 2 verified.