TravelPerk vs Navan: Which Travel Platform Fits in 2026

TravelPerk vs Navan: The Short Version

On US mid-market shortlists, TravelPerk and Navan are the two modern corporate travel platforms that usually make the cut. Both sell business travel booking as software rather than as a phone call to an agency. And both put a policy and approval step between the traveler and the booking: TravelPerk sends the trip approval request to the approver in Slack, with Microsoft Teams as a second route, and Navan handles policy approvals inside its own workflow.

The feature lists make the gap between them look wider than it is. Two differences do most of the work in a real buying decision.

Start with how each company charges. TravelPerk sells travel on a percentage of every booking, with a monthly platform fee stacked on top above the entry tier. Navan gives travel booking away and makes its money from travel providers’ commission fees, then charges for expense management on a per-user basis. Two companies with identical travel volume can land in completely different places depending on which model they sign.

The second is what “travel and spend” actually means where you happen to be. TravelPerk splits its pricing and its product by region, and the spend half of the pitch is built differently in North America than it is in Europe. A US buyer reading a European pricing page is looking at plans that are not sold to them.

There is a third thing, and it is not a line item on either pricing page: someone still has to build the trip and carry it through that approval step. That is where Catch, an AI Executive Assistant that books and manages business travel itself, goes a different way entirely. More on that further down.

At a Glance

	Catch	TravelPerk	Navan
Category	AI Executive Assistant; business travel is one part of the admin role it covers	Corporate travel and spend management platform; rebranded to Perk in November 2025	Corporate travel booking, expense management and corporate cards in a single platform
Platform cost	Flat $99 per month, 10-day free trial	Travel Only: Starter $0, Premium $99 per month, Pro $299 per month	Travel booking is free, funded by travel providers’ commission fees
Per-booking fee	None	5% per booking on Starter, 3% on Premium and Pro	None; Navan states travel booking is free
Expense management	Not part of Catch today	In North America, TravelPerk says it “integrates closely with the top expense tools” rather than selling its own spend product there	Built in: $15 per user per month after the first 5 monthly expensing users
Corporate cards	Not part of Catch today	Card cash back is tier-dependent: 0.5% on Premium, 1% on Pro	Navan-issued cards with up to 1.5% back, plus existing Visa, Mastercard and Amex cards via Navan Connect
Disruption and cancellation	Catch keeps watching after booking, rescans for better rates, and will cancel and rebook; it calls the hotel front desk directly when something needs a human on the line	FlexiTravel: opt in at 10% of the trip cost for an 80% refund on cancellations made up to two hours before departure	The Business tier includes 24/7 travel support agents, and the Waiver Agent monitors airline waivers in real time to alert travelers to rebook

How the Two Pricing Models Work

TravelPerk publishes three travel-only tiers, and they hold in both of its regional pricing panels, so US buyers can take them at face value. Starter carries no platform fee and charges 5% on every booking. Premium is $99 per month plus 3% per booking. Pro runs $299 per month plus 3% per booking. Platform fees are billed per company per month, and there is no annual discount toggle to go hunting for. Worth flagging, though: TravelPerk does say the per-booking percentages are subject to minimum and maximum thresholds, and it does not publish what those thresholds are. So the real cost of a $180 domestic hop versus a $6,000 international business-class ticket cannot be modeled from the published page alone.

Navan runs the opposite model on travel. Booking is free because, in Navan’s words, it is powered by travel providers’ commission fees. The Business tier covers companies up to 300 employees and includes global travel inventory with exclusive rates plus 24/7 travel support agents. Enterprise is for companies above 300 employees, adds dedicated support and corporate negotiated rates, and is priced on request rather than published.

On travel alone, then, Navan has no line item and TravelPerk has one or two depending on the tier. That comparison flips the moment expenses enter the picture, which is the next section.

A practical note for anyone building a spreadsheet: these are not comparable numbers. A percentage of bookings scales with travel volume and ignores headcount entirely. A per-user expense fee scales with headcount and ignores how much anyone flies. A 40-person company where six people are constantly on a plane and a 200-person company where everyone takes one trip a year will rank these two platforms in opposite orders.

Expense Management Is the Real Fork for US Buyers

This is the part quotes most often get wrong, and the reason is mundane: TravelPerk’s pricing page asks you to pick your region first.

TravelPerk’s Travel-and-Spend plans and its Spend-only plans, the ones quoted at a per-user monthly price, sit in the Europe panel. There is no Travel-and-Spend plan in the North America panel. Those per-user figures are real prices. They are simply European ones. If you are buying for a US company and someone has quoted you a per-user monthly TravelPerk spend price, check which panel it came from.

North American buyers get integration instead. TravelPerk’s North America expense page says it “integrates closely with the top expense tools in North America” rather than selling its own spend product there, and the site navigation keeps “Spend in Europe” and “Spend in North America” as separate items. For a US company, that adds up to travel booking that connects to the expense tool you already run.

Navan publishes one price list, no regional variation. Expense is priced at $15 per user per month after the first 5 monthly expensing users, with no minimum, no annual and monthly split, and no separate regional price list. It includes receipt scanning for on-the-go spend and automatic transaction categorization, and Navan’s own cards or your existing Visa, Mastercard and Amex corporate cards feed it through Navan Connect. Sitting behind all that are 30-plus HRIS integrations for keeping employee records in sync.

If your company already has an expense tool it likes and no intention of ripping it out, TravelPerk’s North American shape is a clean fit. If you want travel and expense owned by one vendor in the US, Navan is the one of the two that sells that.

Inventory, the App and the AI Layer

Navan’s business travel page names its inventory explicitly: flights, hotels, trains, rental cars and black cars, with negotiated rates. Black car ground transport is a real part of the offering, with dedicated help centre articles on booking one and on configuring a company’s black car options. Worth naming, because Navan’s own pricing page carries a shorter feature list that leaves black cars out, and write-ups that read only that page miss it.

One TravelPerk detail worth knowing sits on the traveler’s phone. The mobile app works offline: itineraries, booking details and train tickets stay readable with no connection, which is genuinely useful at an airport gate with bad wifi.

Layered on top, Navan has pushed hard on agentic AI. Its hotel concierge uses a multimodal approach to learn a traveler’s preferences, things like amenities, room size and loyalty programs, then curates hotel options that still comply with policy. Ava, its assistant, works the finance side too, summarizing spend by category, comparing spend against policy and projecting future travel habits for managers.

Approvals, Policy and Where They Land

Both platforms put a policy and approval step between the traveler and the booking, which is a large part of why finance teams buy either one. Where they part ways is where the approval conversation happens.

TravelPerk pushes approvals into chat. A trip that needs sign-off generates an approval request in Slack with the trip summary attached, and the approver accepts or declines without leaving the conversation. Approvals can also be received and reviewed in Microsoft Teams. The practical effect is that signing off on a trip does not require opening a separate portal.

Navan handles policy approvals inside its own travel and expense workflow, and it applies policy to what the traveler is shown: the hotel concierge curates options that fall within company policy rather than leaving the compliance check to the traveler. Navan Rewards pushes in the same direction from the other end, since booking under budget earns an employee personal travel credit.

Both approaches work. Both also share a design assumption worth noticing, covered two sections down.

When the Trip Goes Wrong

TravelPerk’s answer is a product you buy in advance. FlexiTravel charges 10% of the trip cost and guarantees an 80% refund on cancellations made up to two hours before departure. For a company whose meetings move constantly, that turns a recurring unknown into a fixed percentage you can budget.

Navan’s answer runs through support and its AI agents. The Business tier includes 24/7 travel support agents, and the Waiver Agent watches airline waivers in real time and alerts travelers to rebook before they get stranded.

Either way, the thing worth pinning down on a sales call is what happens on the trips the automation does not catch: who picks up, how quickly, and what they are actually empowered to change.

The Thing Both Platforms Have in Common

Strip away the pricing models and the regional product differences and TravelPerk and Navan share a shape. A trip gets assembled inside the vendor’s system and routed through an approval step there. That holds whether the sign-off lands in Slack or inside Navan’s own workflow, and whether the company is paying 3% a booking or $15 a month per expensing user.

That premise is not a flaw. It is the right design for a company that wants control, visibility and a single source of truth for travel spend.

It becomes a problem for exactly one person: the executive whose calendar generated the trip in the first place. In practice, that executive very often never touches the platform at all. They forward it to an assistant, and the assistant does the work on their behalf. The booking software is modern. The administrative work behind it still sits with a person.

Where Catch Fits

Catch goes the other way. Its job is to take the admin off the executive’s plate entirely, and business travel is one part of that role. No travel dashboard, no inventory to search, no results page. Catch acts as the travel agent itself, and books from context.

Which means the trip often starts before anyone asks for it. A conference confirmation lands in the inbox. An out-of-town meeting shows up on the calendar. A flight gets booked with no hotel against it. Catch spots the trigger and comes back with the flight and the hotel already chosen, picked against the real meeting address rather than just the right city, and against the executive’s actual preferences: airline, seat, flight times, hotel chain, room type. When the request runs the other direction, it is one message: “Chicago, Tuesday to Thursday.”

Catch books flights and hotels end to end, and it books within the company’s travel policy, including rates, approval flows and authorized upgrades. Rental cars and rail, which both TravelPerk and Navan book, are not part of what Catch books. What it does not do is sell a policy-and-spend console to a finance team. Policy is respected; operating the compliance system is not something the traveler is asked to do.

Then it keeps going after the booking, and that stretch is the part of the job Catch is built around. It rescans for better rates and will cancel and rebook when it finds one. It calls the front desk to confirm a room detail, arranges early check-in or late checkout, books the meeting room, books the restaurant, and can find contacts already in the destination city and set up meetings while the executive is there. Each stay sharpens the profile, so the guesses get better trip after trip. And because it catches the travel trigger in real time and makes booking effortless, tickets get booked early, which is where the meaningful savings actually live.

You reach it in Slack, email, text message, iMessage or by phone, and it makes real outbound calls, always identifying itself as an AI agent. Pricing is a flat $99 per month with a 10-day free trial, voice calls included, no per-call fees, no credits and no tiers. On security it is SOC 2 Type II certified, audited by EY, Google Verified at CASA Tier 2, with US data hosting.

One boundary, stated plainly: Catch does not do expense management or T&E today. If a single vendor owning travel and expense is the requirement, Navan is the one of these three that sells that in the US.

Which One Should You Pick

Choose Catch if:

• You are an executive who travels the same routes repeatedly and wants trips to stop being your own admin problem
• You would rather send a message than open a booking tool, and you want the trip proposed before you think to ask for it
• You want someone watching the trip after it is booked, rescanning rates, handling the late checkout, calling the hotel
• Your company has a travel policy and you want bookings to respect it without operating a compliance console
• Travel is one piece of a wider admin load you want handled: calendar, email, scheduling, calls and bookings
• One flat monthly price appeals more than a percentage of every ticket or a per-user meter

Choose TravelPerk if: you already run an expense tool in the US that you are keeping, and you want travel booking that connects to it, with approvals living in Slack or Teams and FlexiTravel covering trips that get cancelled often.

Choose Navan if: you specifically need one US vendor owning both travel and expense, with corporate cards and reconciliation in the same system.

Both of those are real fits, and both describe a company building a travel program. For the executive who wants the trip to happen rather than a travel program to run, Catch is the different answer: there is no console to open, because the booking happens on your behalf.

Frequently Asked Questions