TRAVELPERK

Avi Meir was an Israeli entrepreneur living in Barcelona. Javier Suarez was a Spanish engineer.

Both had spent years traveling for work and hating every second of the booking process. Corporate travel in 2015 meant calling a travel management company, filling out forms, waiting for approvals, and getting stuck with overpriced flights because the corporate tool had terrible inventory.

They started TravelPerk with a simple thesis: if Booking.com made personal travel easy, someone should do the same for work travel. The key insight was that 90% of business trips are straightforward (one flight, one hotel, two nights) and don't need a human travel agent.

Build a self-service platform with the same inventory as consumer sites but with corporate features like policy controls, invoicing, and approval workflows built in.

Barcelona was an unusual base for a travel-tech startup. But Meir argued it gave them access to multilingual European talent at lower cost than London or Paris.

The first customers were other Barcelona startups. Word spread fast because anyone who used TravelPerk immediately wanted to tell their CFO about it.

SaaS subscription plus transaction fees. Companies pay a monthly fee for the platform, which handles booking, expense management, policy compliance, and travel analytics.

TravelPerk then takes a margin on each booking made through the platform (hotels, flights, trains, rental cars). The subscription tiers range from free (small teams) to enterprise.

The clever part is FlexiPerk, which lets companies cancel any booking for any reason and get at least 80% back. TravelPerk self-insures this, taking a small premium per booking.

It's essentially a built-in travel insurance product. Corporate travel managers love it because it removes the biggest headache in business travel: cancellations and changes.

The company also earns from GreenPerk, its carbon offset program, and from partnerships with airlines and hotel chains offering negotiated corporate rates.

The core TravelPerk platform handles end-to-end business travel: search, book, manage, expense, and report. Inventory includes flights, hotels, trains, and rental cars from hundreds of suppliers.

FlexiPerk is the cancellation product: cancel any trip for any reason, get 80%+ back. Companies pay a small per-booking premium for this flexibility.

GreenPerk is the carbon offsetting product. It automatically calculates the carbon footprint of every trip and lets companies offset it with verified projects.

TravelPerk Connect is the integration marketplace linking to HR systems, accounting tools, and communication platforms. The Traveler app gives employees a consumer-grade mobile experience for managing their trips.

For finance teams, there's centralized invoicing, real-time spend dashboards, and policy compliance monitoring.

Land and expand in mid-market companies, then move upmarket to enterprise. TravelPerk started with startups and scale-ups (100-500 employees) and is now signing deals with companies of 5,000+ employees.

The free tier gets small teams hooked. As companies grow, they upgrade.

Geographic expansion across Europe and into the US is the other big lever. The company opened a US office and is aggressively pursuing American mid-market companies.

They've also built an app marketplace (TravelPerk Connect) with 50+ integrations to tools like Slack, SAP, BambooHR, and expense management platforms. The goal is to become the operating system for business travel, not just a booking tool.

COVID hit TravelPerk like a freight train. Business travel went to zero in March 2020.

Not reduced. Zero.

The company had to lay off staff and cut costs dramatically. Revenue vanished overnight.

For a company whose entire business is people traveling for work, a global lockdown was the worst possible scenario.

But the pandemic also proved TravelPerk's thesis. When travel restarted, companies didn't want to go back to legacy travel management companies with clunky systems and slow response times.

They wanted flexible, self-service, digital-first tools. TravelPerk's FlexiPerk cancellation product became even more valuable in a world where trips could be canceled at any moment due to new COVID rules.

The company came out of the pandemic growing faster than before it.

DST Global led the Series D that made TravelPerk a unicorn. General Atlantic, Kinnevik, and Target Global were repeat investors across multiple rounds.

Spark Capital, the firm behind Twitter and Slack, came in early. Felix Capital led the seed.

The investor list reads like a who's who of European tech backers plus top-tier American firms. Notably, they raised $160 million in 2022 at a $1.4 billion valuation, right when travel was rebounding.

The timing was impeccable.