How a Global Video Platform Cut Business Flight Costs 43% and Turned 40-Hour Event Logistics Into a 30-Minute Task
The Challenge
Agora — a real-time engagement platform-as-a-service powering video, voice, and live interaction for developers globally — operated with no centralised travel policy and no visibility into where employees were booking or how much they were spending. Staff booked flights through consumer sites, airline portals, and search engines independently, creating a patchwork of receipts with no central audit trail. When organising company events, the People and Programs team spent 20–40 hours manually coordinating flights, accommodation, and logistics per event — a recurring cost absorbed invisibly into operational overhead. There was zero location visibility for duty-of-care, and expense reconciliation was a manual, time-intensive process at month end.
The Solution
Agora implemented Navan Business Travel and Navan Travel Payments, consolidating all travel booking, policy enforcement, and expense processing onto one platform. Automated policy controls replaced manual approval chains — employees booked within guardrails without requiring manager sign-off for compliant choices. Real-time visibility gave the People team a live picture of traveller locations and outstanding bookings. For company events, Navan's group travel coordination tools replaced the manual flight research and outreach process entirely. AI-powered support handled routine employee questions that had previously required direct team involvement.
The Outcome
Flight costs fell 43% following implementation, driven by automated policy controls that nudged employees toward cost-effective options and gave the finance team full spend visibility for the first time. Event coordination time collapsed from 20–40 hours per event to approximately 30 minutes — a 90% reduction — by removing the manual outreach and research process that had consumed the People team's capacity. Traveller satisfaction scored 4.9 out of 5, confirming that cost discipline did not come at the expense of employee experience.
Strategic Takeaway
Agora's travel problem is structural, not behavioural. When there is no central booking system, cost control is impossible — not because employees make poor choices, but because there is no mechanism to surface better options at the point of booking. The 43% flight cost reduction came primarily from making the policy-compliant option the default, not from mandating unpopular restrictions. The more operationally significant metric is the 90% reduction in event coordination time: what consumed two full working days per event is now a 30-minute task. For tech companies where People and Operations teams run lean, this kind of invisible overhead — manual logistics that does not generate revenue but absorbs skilled labour — represents a meaningful cost that rarely appears in cost-reduction initiatives.
- Travel cost control does not require restricting employee choice — it requires surfacing cost-efficient options at the point of booking with automated policy guardrails.
- Group event logistics are a hidden operational cost: the manual coordination of flights for 20–50 people can consume a full week of skilled labour per event. Purpose-built tooling reduces this to near zero.
- Unified travel and expense on one platform creates a feedback loop: spend data informs policy refinement, which drives further cost reduction over time.
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