Certify Buys Booking Tool in Latest Travel and Expense Tie-Up

Expense solution providers are looking to diversify their product offerings, and that includes a more significant move into providing online booking tools for business travelers. To a certain extent many already do this, and Concur looms large over the sector.

Certify has acquired a travel booking tool from nuTravel that will give its larger clients the ability to book travel through Certify’s platform. Its current offering, Certify Travel, is aimed mainly at small businesses.

Certify, which is now a part of a larger group of expense service providers including Nexonia, Tallie, and ExpenseWatch, is looking to go after Concur, which just announced its own offering geared towards small businesses. The integration of travel and expenses is a big part of that. Deem has a similar solution, as does KDS, which was acquired last year by American Express Global Business Travel.

“Acquiring the booking tool from nuTravel gives Certify complete ownership and control over the platform, including development, product lifecycle, pricing and distribution,” said Certify CEO Bob Neveu. “It also means that Certify’s leading customer support team will also be responsible for our enterprise travel customers. And Certify Enterprise Travel also complements our current Certify Travel offering, giving us the ability to meet the needs of small businesses up to global enterprise companies.”

Basically, this sort of end-to-end solution lets all aspects of a trip sit on Certify’s platform for connection to a company’s given travel management partner. The deal involves a team of developers and the booking tool from nuTravel, which will continue to offer its own airline solutions. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.