Yatra Launches AI-Powered Expense Management Solution for Small Businesses

31.05.2024 - 18:59 / skift.com / Dhruv Shringi / Bulbul Dhawan

Online travel agency Yatra is working to expand its corporate share and enhancing its services to expand its total market, CEO Dhruv Shringi said on Friday.

In fiscal 2024, the company signed 83 new corporate clients with an annual billing potential of INR 5.4 billion ($64.7 million).

Enhancing its offerings, the company has launched a new expense management solution for small, medium, and large enterprises. According to Yatra, the generative AI-powered solution aims to ensure accurate and comprehensive expense tracking in order to reduce errors and save time. It is meant to help businesses handle their travel and non-travel expenses, “while offering a seamless integration of travel bookings and expense tracking,” the company said. 

“The expense management is a large and highly profitable segment and our product capabilities make it a product that is suitable not just for the Indian market, but for international markets as well,” Shringi said during an earnings call on Friday.

The Skift Data + AI Summit in New York next week will bring together visionaries, who are shaping the future of travel through data-driven insights and AI technologies.

Yatra has also launched a new guesthouse booking platform for its corporate clients. The platform can integrate guesthouses contracted by both Yatra and the respective corporate in a single view, along with real-time inventory. “By offering guest houses, we provide customers the option of being able to optimize their lodging spend,” the CEO said.

While continuing to scale its corporate business, Yatra said it would also focus on growing its hotels business, both for customers and corporate clients. The company said it has also hired a team to scale hotels in the corporate travel segment. 

“We are actively pitching hotels to our current corporate customers, and we should see meaningful improvement in growth in hotels in the second half of this year,” Shringi said. 

He said work is also on to enhance and modernize the hotel platform of the company. 

In fiscal 2024, the company recorded bookings in the hotels and packages segment worth INR 8.74 billion ($105 million), up from INR 8.15 billion ($98 million) in the previous year. However, the hotel room nights booked declined from nearly 1.8 million in 2022-23 to 1.7 million in 2023-24.