Navan rebuilds multi-city booking engine to debut new tool

Functionality simplifies and speeds up round-trip business travel bookings

All-in-one business travel, payments, and expense management platform, Navan, has revealed it has upgraded its multi-city booking engine.

The firm rebuilt the functionality, now designed to handle the "most complex travel scenarios". 

New functionality sees travellers no longer need human travel agents for complex trips, which it has dubbed a "significant engineering challenge" due to the fact online booking tools must ingest thousands of variables across routes, carriers and prices, analyse them, to then present in a digestible format to the traveller.

The new multi-city engine is said to offers the expertise of a seasoned travel agent through a "powerful new algorithm that integrates modern content sources like NDC".

"We spent years refining our one-way and round-trip booking flows until they were intuitive, fast, and beautiful,” said Ian Fette, vice president of engineering at Navan. 

“Multi-city booking is one of the hardest engineering challenges in travel, which is why legacy T&E platforms haven’t been able to offer it. 

"We rebuilt our multi-city engine from the ground up, aiming to make booking a five-leg international trip as straightforward as a one-way flight home."