Booking.com has decided to enhance its business travel proposition with a suite of India-specific enhancements. These enhancements aim to simplify travel management while balancing employee flexibility and organisational control. The startup ecosystem in India is rapidly expanding, and the country’s more than 63 million MSMEs are seen as the next frontier for managed corporate travel.

With the goal of making corporate travel management more accessible for startups and small and medium enterprises, the online travel platform has introduced new features for Booking.com for Business. These features include support for GST invoicing, AI-powered expense management, tools to ensure the safety of travellers, controls over spending, and flexible payment options. More than 31 million lodging listings and 500 airlines covering 4,500 destinations worldwide are accessible through the free site.

“Managed travel is no longer the preserve of large corporations,” stated Santosh Kumar, Regional Head, South Asia, Booking. com, speaking exclusively to ETTravelWorld. “The business travel landscape in India is experiencing a structural shift.”substantial companies with substantial travel expenditures and specialised travel teams have traditionally been the target audience for managed travel solutions. Startups and SMEs that are growing across cities typically handle their travel through local travel agents, manual processes, or disjointed consumer portals. According to Kumar, this is still a major hole in India’s ever-changing business travel scene.

Better transparency into travel expenditure, simplified GST procedures, enhanced duty of care for employees, and consumer-grade booking experiences are all things that are in high demand as firms grow and travel gets more complicated.