Singapore-based Travelstop has launched its business travel and expense management platform in seven Asian markets – Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.
This follows its recent seed funding from Singapore venture capital firm SeedPlus.
Available in seven languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Travelstop automates expense reporting for businesses, and offers support for regional tax differences, reporting formats, payment options. The company plans to introduce customer service to its users in local languages in the near future.
“Many companies in Asia have offices in multiple countries across the region. Our goal is to provide these users with the best possible experience in their local language and currency, while ensuring that we offer the most relevant booking options,” said Prashant Kirtane, Travelstop’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement.
“We now offer the largest selection of flights in the region, with over 800 carriers, including most regional and low-cost carriers.”
Travelstop has also added several new features to further support business travellers and travel managers within the region.
With its new Book for Others feature, Travelstop aims to improve the productivity of travel managers by replacing a largely manual process, with a simple, online process to book travel for employees within a company. This is particularly useful for companies that prefer to more tightly control the business travel booking process or in countries where technology acceptance is generally lower.
For business travellers, adherence to a company’s travel policy is both cumbersome and challenging, often resulting in business travel bookings that are either over-budget or out-of-policy.
To address this, Travelstop has introduced a method for travel managers to set up Business Travel Policies for all their employees. Once set up, business travel bookings that are outside of travel policies are automatically flagged during the booking process, allowing companies to improve overall compliance and reduce costs.
The Asian region also continues to see a rapid increase in the adoption of mobile devices across countries in the region. Globally, Asia has the largest share of mobile internet traffic, with 61 per cent of its population using mobile devices to go online.
As such, Travelstop has also launched its iPhone app to help users access their trip information and manage their business expenses on-the-go. An Android version will be available in the next few months.
“Our goal is to make employees more productive; they no longer have to return from their business trips and spend hours dealing with the much-dreaded expense claims process,” said Altaf Dhamani, Travelstop’s co-founder and chief product officer.
