By Marne Martin, CEO, Emburse
The business travel landscape is at a crossroads as the pace of technology accelerates. While some companies are doubling down on consolidation and closed ecosystems, we see a more empowered future; one where openness, adaptability, and proactive insights drive greater value and speed for every organization.
At Emburse, smarter business travel starts with freedom, unleashed by the power of data. Freedom to choose the partners that fit your travel program best. Freedom to integrate seamlessly into your existing systems, without complexity or compromise. With Expense Intelligence, organizations gain the freedom to transform raw data into actionable insights—elevating travel from being a cost center to a strategic growth driver. After all, expense management always begins with a business trip, a vendor purchase, or some other type of employee-initiated spend.
Choice of Travel Partners
No two organizations are alike. That’s why at Emburse, we’ve built a platform designed around choice and flexibility. Whether you work with TMCs and OBTs like Amex GBT, BCD, FCM, Amadeus Cytric, or Emburse Book, our integrations are designed to flex with you, not limit your options.
Choice means agility. It means you’re never boxed in by a single TMC provider’s roadmap. Instead, your travel program evolves right alongside your business. At Emburse, we offer a wider range of travel content, flexibility, and direct fulfillment, ensuring you always have the right options, every time. This breadth is powering exciting innovations in Q4 and coming up in 2026 with Emburse AI, the only purpose-built and proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) in the travel and expense industry. Emburse AI is now delighting users in 140+ countries and processing expenses in 200 countries and territories worldwide.
Seamless, Flexible Integration
I often hear from our customers that integration challenges remain one of the biggest barriers to achieving efficiency and realizing timely business value in corporate travel. Organizations face long deployment timelines, complex IT projects, and workflows that unnecessarily force them into someone else’s mold.
Emburse takes a different approach. With Expense Intelligence, travel and expenses are seamlessly integrated. Air and hotel reshopping, itinerary management, policy compliance, and expense reporting are unified, without the friction of forced integrations. This allows finance teams and travelers to act faster and see results sooner while reducing costly IT overhead. Because we unify travel and expense data into actionable intelligence, organizations gain analytics that drive real outcomes and help leaders make sharper, more strategic decisions. These capabilities are delivered through our analytics and audit solutions, benchmarking tools, and advanced data processing so you don’t have to manage the complexity yourself.
Buyer-First Savings Through Travel Reshopping
One of the unique ways Emburse drives outsized value for customers is through travel reshopping with Emburse Reshop. By continuously searching for better hotel and airfare rates, we deliver direct-to-customer savings that many consolidated systems cannot.
Here’s the difference: Emburse is OBT and TMC agnostic. We don’t benefit from commissionable rates or closed incentives. Our sole focus is your bottom line. By combining one of the largest corporate travel data sets in the industry with actionable analytics, Emburse gives organizations leverage they've never had before, detecting contract leakage, identifying price gaps, and revealing insights that strengthen vendor negotiations. This is buyer-first value at scale, delivering up to 200% more savings than leading competitors in travel spend optimization, all powered by our industry benchmarking database.
Coming Soon: Emburse Shop
Emburse Reshop is just one way we’re helping customers save today. But what excites me most is what we’re building next.
At GBTA Denver 2025, we unveiled a prototype of Emburse Shop, our next-generation AI-powered booking experience. It serves as a dynamic front-end to the content and booking options available through the OBTs and TMCs we partner with or integrate into. Attendees saw firsthand how AI can redefine the way travel is planned, booked, and managed—all within a conversational and intuitive interface.
With Emburse Shop, we’re simplifying the booking process through:
- Policy-aware shopping and reshopping that guides business travelers to compliant choices from the start.
- Mobile-first, frictionless design that feels as intuitive as the best consumer apps.
- Embedded controls that give finance and procurement teams influence before dollars are spent.
- Seamless integration with Emburse Enterprise and Professional, ensuring tighter reconciliation and reporting.
What makes this even more powerful is that Emburse AI is built-in at the core, with purpose-built intelligence that drives smarter workflows across travel reshopping and expense management. Emburse Shop delivers intelligent automation that simplifies every stage of the travel experience, while Emburse Assurance provides pre- and post-expense guidance to ensure every trip is optimized.
As we continue to evolve, we’re shaping AI interactions around how travelers naturally plan; whether that’s chatting with a booking assistant or uploading an itinerary to receive compliant, optimized recommendations.
Emburse Shop is set to disrupt corporate booking in ways that will benefit business travelers, finance leaders, and TMCs and also bring forward new and enhanced ways to optimize the booking, reshop, auditing and payment of travel.
Innovation That Looks Ahead
Between reshopping, and Emburse Shop, our vision is clear: to deliver smarter travel and expense management that is modern, adaptive, and built around real customer value.
That means continuing to innovate by consolidating the T&E ecosystem into one platform while keeping it open and configurable. It means giving organizations the power to save more, move faster, and plan with precision.
The future of business travel must be innovative, with breakthroughs like AI-driven reshopping and conversational booking. It must be open, with integrations that align with customers' goals. And it must be transformative, unlocking growth and advantage beyond traditional savings.
Expense Intelligence: How Today’s Choice Becomes Tomorrow’s Advantage
The reality is that industry consolidation continues to limit customer choice. At Emburse, we’re doubling down on autonomy, giving organizations the freedom to choose their partners, integrate on their own terms, and build travel programs that elevate their strategy, not a vendor’s.
Choice isn’t optional; it’s a strategic advantage.
The future of business travel belongs to those who embrace openness and intelligence, and Emburse is proud to lead that transformation. Behind every data point is a story; customers finding new ways to save, improve traveler experiences, and make smarter decisions that move their organizations forward with confidence.
If you’d like to see how our solutions come together to support your team’s goals, book a demo today.