Super happy for the Travelstop team!

Travelstop, a Singapore-based business travel startup, raises US$3 million in Pre-Series A funding led by Accel, with participation from Strive and SeedPlus

— Read on blog.travelstop.com/travelstop-raises-3m-led-by-accel/

Sponsors – Skift Forum Asia 2019

Awesome to see Travelstop there!

What we shipped: Tags, preferred hotels, and more

Digging all the new features!

Nice Travelstop mention:

There are others that are either hoping to bypass or complement existing services with their own takes on how to improve business travel such as TravelPerk (most recent raise: $44 million), Travelstop (an Asia-focused spin), and TripActions (most recently valued at $1 billion), to name a few. That speaks to an increasingly crowded market of players that are competing against incumbents like SAP, which owns Concur, Hipmunk and a plethora of other older services.

Lola.com raises $37M to take on SAP and others in the world of business travel | TechCrunch
— Read on techcrunch.com/2019/03/26/lola-raises-37m-to-take-on-sap-and-others-in-the-world-of-business-travel/

One such newcomer is Travelstop, a software-as-a-service travel management platform that launched in Singapore in August 2018. While Asia’s travel market is booming, as many as nine in 10 business trips booked in the region are still totally unmanaged, meaning “not bound by preferred suppliers, and tools, formal policies, and compliance,” as Skift recently reported. (By contrast, about seven in 10 trips are unmanaged in the United States.) The few individuals that do undertake managed trips don’t always follow policy, according to a McKinsey survey on Asian business travel habits, which found that about one in three “business travelers do not always strictly adhere to their company policy.” Such situations raise both cost-overrun and risk management concerns for employers and make life more complicated for travelers.

The Future of Business Travel in Asia Is the Future of Business Travel Period – Skift

Lots of new stuff but these two are especially useful:

🛄 Integrated baggage purchase
We all know that the cheaper fares of low-cost carriers come without baggage allowance. Earlier we presented you flight options with and without baggage, which wasn’t that flexible. Now, with our integrated baggage purchase, you can customise the baggage you want to add for any of your flights. For example, you may not need checked baggage for your onward flight, but require 25kg checked baggage for the return flight (for all the gifts you may be carrying back for your team). Good news – we’ve made that super easy to do now.

🛫 Flights interlining
Want to book your onward flight on Scoot and return on AirAsia? No problem! With interlining, you can now book multiple carriers on a single itinerary. We do all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, making it super easy to book your preferred flights in minutes. That means you no longer have to spend hours on dozens of websites trying to find the perfect flight.

What we shipped: Baggage purchase, flights interlining, and more

Long read on Travelstop.

The race is on.

Travelstop Counts on Asian Startups to Unlock New Era in Corporate Travel – Skift

New markets and languages – lots of new features.

Singapore’s Travelstop officially expands to seven markets in Asia