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Finance can now ensure every trip meets policy before it’s booked, rather than weeks after the money’s gone
Since launch, Spendesk has delighted users by turning previously tedious admin tasks into a simple and rewarding experience. With that in mind, the next step on our roadmap is a travel product that allows clients to book flights and hotels directly within the Spendesk app.
As a user-obsessed business, Spendesk constantly speaks to clients to understand their changing needs. In a survey last year, travel functionality was their number-one request. Fully 43% asked for it. I’m pleased to say our engineers have been working away in the background, and travel is now almost ready for prime time.
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Adding travel is a logical next step for Spendesk – and feeds into a market trend for the consolidation of Office of the CFO tools.
For our core users, the benefit of adding travel to Spendesk’s expense management functionality is obvious: it will simplify their experience. Salespeople on the ground or product leaders attending a conference won’t have to flip between multiple apps. Booking a trip will be faster and easier.
For our other key constituency of users – those behind the scenes in a company’s finance team – the benefits are more sophisticated. Finance will now be able to ensure every trip meets its policies before it’s booked, rather than discovering a breach weeks after the money’s gone. They gain proactive visibility across travel spend, without manually managing every trip.
The future of user interfaces
Adding travel booking to Spendesk – an improvement that comes at no extra cost to clients – has also been a good test case for us to develop and simplify our user interfaces. Booking a trip isn’t always simple, with a lot of variables to consider. But our app interface aims to allow you to finalise your journey within just three taps.
We don’t want to rest here, however. In the medium term, we plan to launch an AI travel assistant that can understand natural language requests, producing itineraries that are fully compliant and optimised against your company’s policies. Users will be able to tell our app, “I want to go to London next week, from Monday to Wednesday,” and it will know what kind of hotel you prefer, whether you like a room on the ground floor, what time you like to fly and how long it will take you to get to the airport from home. The AI assistant will do some digging, then present you with a proposed itinerary to sign off on (while also keeping your company’s finance team in the loop if anything looks amiss, of course).
There are some that see AI as a challenge for software tools like Spendesk, but on the contrary, I see AI as the logical evolution of our user interface. For a good decade now, the default for human interaction with software has been via a smartphone touchscreen. That will continue to be important for a number of years yet, but natural language interfaces – either via typed conversation with a chatbot or via voice – will become increasingly common.
It’s important to note, though, that while AI may replace the user interface, it won’t replace the whole product. Behind the user interface, a software product like Spendesk is a series of databases, boundaries to control permissions and trust, tools for auditability and compliance, surfaces that facilitate integration between systems, etc., etc. AI doesn’t make this go away. AI still requires structured data, permissions, audit trails, and so on.
Taking user experience to the next level
Launching travel is one of our key missions for 2026, one that we hope will build on Spendesk’s history of delighting users. We constantly track our users’ net promoter score (NPS) and are proud that it’s consistently market-leading.
Another key goal for 2026 is to bring more of this delight from our consumer-facing app to our users in the back-office finance teams. This key group deserves the same high standards of user experience, whether through clean web interfaces or AI chatbots. The imminent launch of travel booking will be an important step down this road.
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