Skift Travel News Blog

Company spending on co-working spaces is on the up, while business travel is declining, according to corporate card and expense firm Ramp.

The clear winner is WeWork, but the report also pinpoints OpenAI, the maker of popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT, as another fast-growing budget winner.

The latest Spending Benchmarks report from Ramp, which has tracked patterns over the last quarter of 2022, covers $10 billion of aggregate annual spend across 13,000 of its customers.

Company travel and expense spend as a percentage of total transaction volume declined from October to December. The report also said in December that as a category, travel and expense, as well as lodging, both declined on the previous month — the first time they’ve done so in six months.

This could be due to companies tightening their belts due to economic uncertainty, but also because of mass layoffs in the tech sector.

Office spending jumped 5.7 percent in the last three months of the year, making it the fifth-fastest growing bucket of spend among top categories.

“The post-pandemic office is increasingly a co-working space,” said the report.

Spending with WeWork increased 90.7 percent in 2022, and consistently ranked as the second-largest office vendor throughout the year, behind Microsoft Store, it added.

“Businesses aren’t hiring, but offices are still making a comeback as organizations look for ways to drive employee productivity,” the report said.

Artificial intelligence also rears its head. “We predict hiring will remain muted in tech-oriented industries that are focused on enhancing profitability metrics,” said the report. “It will pick up in labor-intensive industries that are addressing supply chain issues and demand. Spending with AI research companies like OpenAI will grow as companies invest in tools that can help lean teams achieve more.”

Spending on OpenAI rocketed in December, and it’s likely that steep trajectory will continue as more sectors begin experimenting in the technology.

WeWork reports its fourth-quarter results on Thursday. 

Corporate travel agency TripActions this week secured $400 million in credit facilities from Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank, which it said it will use to “accelerate the expansion of its customer base.”

The credit facilities consist of a warehouse debt facility from Goldman Sachs Bank USA, as the senior lender and administrative agent, with a $200 million commitment ($300M total program limit) and an asset-backed lending facility of $100 million led by Silicon Valley Bank.

TripActions said the warehouse facility will enable the continued growth of its corporate card and expense management solution, TripActions Liquid. “With this new warehouse facility from Goldman Sachs, TripActions Liquid is well positioned to support its customers while continuing to innovate at a rapid pace,” said executive vice president Michael Sindicich, head of TripActions Liquid, in a statement.

The corporate travel agency’s latest financial dealings follow October’s raising of more than $300 million. That involved a combination of $154 million in equity from new and existing financial investors, plus a $150 million structured capital transaction led by Coatue.

The company also last month bought Spain’s Atlanta Events & Corporate Travel Consultants, its fourth acquisition in 18 months.

Meanwhile, there’s still no news on a potential initial public offering to further fund the business.

SAP, the parent company of the Concur suite of tools for managing travel expenses, said on Tuesday the company’s unit was recovering after the pandemic shock.

“Concur is actually recovering very nicely,” said Luka Mucic, chief financial officer for the German software giant. “They are only representing this quarter a 1 percent drag on the growth [in SAP’s Cloud Choice Profit (CCP) unit of cloud businesses].”

“Actually on the transactional revenue side, they are already showing very high growth in the high double digits,” Mucic said. “So that business will definitely exceed its pre-pandemic state next year, as we had projected.”

SAP cited increased use of Concur by existing clients. For example, Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. has used SAP Concur Solutions for over 15 years. But in the third quarter, it expanded its partnership because of increased student, faculty, and administrator travel.

“Our intelligence spend and business network is benefiting from a return to business travel combined with the increased focus on managing costs with cloud revenue growth in the mid-teens,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP.

As Skift recently reported, SAP Concur Travel is getting its first overhaul in more than 15 years. Earlier this week G2, a leading software rating service, named Concur as a market leader in its reviews-based ranking for travel expense management.

Corporate hotel booking platform HRS has bought PayPense, as it pushes further into expense management.

Terms of the deal, announced on Thursday, weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition follows its purchase of billing company Itelya in 2021.

Staff at Germany’s PayPense will officially become HRS Pay employees when the acquisition formally closes in August.

Interestingly, HRS now describes itself as a “global corporate travel and payment technology platform.” HRS, which stands for Hotel Reservation Service, said buying PayPense enhances its “growing compilation of efficient corporate payment offerings.”

PayPense is used by companies to let employees use digital payment technology to pay for all work-related purchases. That helps ensure compliance to budgets while also capturing relevant data for auditing, steering and even sustainability metrics, the company said. Using supplier and localized data, PayPense can capture carbon emissions of individual expenses.

“With the full integration of PayPense, our complete end-to-end spend management platform provides unmatched visibility of level-3 data, multi-category invoice digitization, and superior VAT reclaim automation — all available globally via any payment provider,” said said Kurt Knackstedt, chief growth officer at HRS Pay.