Corporate Travel Booking Software That Doubled Bookings and Cut Failed Payments by 34%
Overview
Corpay is a B2B corporate travel management software platform, delivered as a multi-tenant SaaS product, that helps small and midsize companies book workforce accommodation and control travel spend. It reached out to Euristiq to enhance and expand its booking and expense-management software with more value for its clients, after a period of contraction during the pandemic left its engineering team needing to rebuild and scale quickly. Unique users and hotel searches roughly tripled, successful card payments rose 34%, and platform uptime climbed to 99.69%.
Increase in unique users and hotel searches
Increase in successful credit-card payments
Lowest weekly platform uptime, up from 97.49%
About the corporate
travel software Euristiq worked on
An outdated, monolithic codebase
Credit-card payments were broken beyond repair. The corporate travel booking software ran on a monolith that made every fix and feature release slower and riskier.
Payment friction for travelers and hotels
Business travelers often had to share personal card details to secure hotel rooms, and refunds were far from frictionless.
No real-time expense visibility
Companies had no easy way to track workforce travel spend, issue prepaid cards to travelers, or reclaim VAT across markets.
Engineering that had outgrown its process
The team grew from roughly 10 to 30+ engineers without a structure to match, which made delivery slower rather than faster.
Rebuilding payments first,
then the rest of the platform
Legacy transformation: micro teams and migration to microservices
The existing corporate travel software’s codebase was outdated, and this had a direct impact on the product’s users — most visibly, a credit-card payment feature that was broken beyond repair.
Euristiq migrated the credit-card payment component off the monolith, implemented a microservices approach, and added support for the 3D Secure v2 protocol (an authentication standard for online card payments) with automatic fallback to version 1, ensuring frictionless refunds.
We also recommended splitting the engineering team into self-sufficient micro teams focused on specific domains — lodging and booking, hotel connectivity, payments and finances, and internal operations tools.
Third-party integrations that reduced payment friction
Euristiq implemented several third-party integrations with reporting services to minimize payment friction. One integration let customers claim VAT refunds; another, with virtual card providers, let business travelers secure hotel reservations without sharing their own credit-card information with hotels.
These integrations made it easier for corporate customers to manage payments and bookings without the manual back-and-forth the old system required.
Expense management built for travelers, not spreadsheets
Euristiq also built expense-management functionality that issues a virtual credit card to a traveler for meal allowances, lets admins customize spending policies, and gives real-time information on travelers’ financial needs.
Virtual cards are issued via a third-party service, carry customizable limits, and can be monitored in real time through analytics — with a mobile app that lets travelers add a card to a digital wallet, request additional funds, and report expenses. As part of this work, Euristiq also improved database query response time to no more than 50 milliseconds.
Migrating corporate travel software to AWS for scale and lower cost
Payments optimized with 3D Secure v2 and seamless refunds
Expense management, VAT refunds, and virtual cards enabled at scale
Query response times reduced to under 50ms
2× bookings, 34% fewer failed payments, near-perfect uptime
Usage roughly tripled
Weekly unique users grew from around 1,500 to 3,200, and hotel searches from around 8,900 to 20,000 per week, between June 2021 and April 2023 — a 2× increase in unique users and hotel searches overall.
34% more successful card payments
Migrating card payments off the monolith and onto a 3D Secure v2 flow, with automatic fallback to v1, cut failures and lifted successful credit-card payments by 34%.
More searches resolve in under 6 seconds
The share of location searches returning in under 6 seconds rose from 77% to 90% — a 13-percentage-point improvement in search speed.
Uptime climbed to 99.69%
The platform’s lowest weekly uptime improved from 97.49% to 99.69% over two years of ongoing collaboration.
Modernize legacy & build
modern SaaS applications 2X faster
FAQ
What is corporate travel management software?
Corporate travel management software is a B2B platform that lets companies book, manage, and pay for employee travel — typically hotels, flights, and related expenses — from a single system instead of relying on manual bookings and expense reports. It centralizes negotiated rates, policy compliance, and spend visibility for finance and travel managers. Corpay is one example: its corporate travel booking software lets small and midsize businesses book accommodation, issue virtual payment cards to travelers, and track spend in real time, replacing spreadsheets and one-off bookings with a single accountable system.
How does corporate travel booking software reduce costs?
Corporate travel booking software reduces costs primarily by centralizing bookings and payments so companies capture negotiated rates, cut manual admin, and give finance teams real-time visibility into spend. For Corpay’s platform, migrating to AWS and to a microservices architecture also cut infrastructure costs directly, while removing manual, error-prone payment handling reduced losses from failed transactions. The combined effect was a 34% increase in successful card payments alongside materially lower engineering and hosting overhead.
What should corporate travel expense management software include?
At minimum, corporate travel expense management software should let a company issue virtual or physical payment cards to travelers, set spending limits and policies per employee, and report on spend in real time. It should also support VAT and tax reclaim across markets, and integrate with hotel and travel providers so payments don’t require sharing a traveler’s or company’s card details directly. Corpay’s platform added all of these — configurable virtual cards, real-time analytics, and third-party VAT-refund integrations — on top of its core booking software.
Can corporate travel software integrate with existing finance and expense systems?
Yes — modern corporate travel software is typically built with an API layer specifically so it can integrate with existing finance, expense, and reporting systems rather than replacing them. Corpay’s platform, for example, connects to multiple third-party reporting and virtual-card providers so travel spend flows into the company’s own finance tools rather than sitting in a silo. When evaluating a vendor, ask specifically which accounting, expense, and card-issuing integrations are supported out of the box, and how long implementation typically takes.
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