Navan just bought the software that decides which hotels get asked to bid
BoomPop sells corporate planners a 30% cut in event booking costs, by its own estimate, and on September 9 it became part of the platform that already holds your corporate clients' travel
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. Navan announced on September 9 that it had acquired BoomPop, an events platform founded in 2023, for an undisclosed sum. Navan's own release describes what it bought: technology that runs a corporate event from end to end — venue and vendor sourcing, room blocks, contracts and payments. BoomPop has supported events for roughly 250,000 people at companies including Accenture, Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Shopify. The two had been working together since a partnership announced earlier this year.
The number in the announcement is the product. In the same release, BoomPop estimates it has helped its customers cut costs by about 30% on average on event bookings, for gatherings ranging from fifteen people to conferences with thousands. Read that from your side of the table. Event booking costs are the function room, the block and the food and beverage. A platform whose headline promise to the buyer is thirty percent off is promising it on your banquet invoice.
What Navan actually acquired was the sourcing. When the two companies announced their partnership in February, Navan set out how the machinery works. A planner describes the event in ordinary words. The system proposes dates and destinations, offers venues from a curated marketplace, and lets the planner negotiate the RFP and the room block without leaving the platform. Speaking to investors this week, Navan management described the technology as automating both the buyer's side and the vendor's side of an event booking. The vendor is you.
It is the second such purchase in a fortnight. Spotnana bought the meetings platform Troop on August 26, and we wrote at the time that Steve Singh's stated aim was to fold the group RFP into the same pipe that already books the transient traveler — within twelve months. Navan announced no aim. It bought an engine that was already running.
Why Navan wanted it. Meetings and events is the part of corporate spend that managed travel never captured. Navan told investors about half of that spend still runs outside managed channels — its own estimate. Navan already holds the transient travel relationship with these companies. Now it holds the offsite as well.
The catch. Navan has published nothing about how a venue joins that marketplace, whether it costs a property anything, or whether a planner can ask for a hotel the marketplace does not carry. That last one is the question an independent most needs answered, and it is not on the record anywhere.
What it means for hotels. Your sales manager can name the source of every group RFP that arrived this year. Nobody can name the ones that were never sent. That is the whole problem with a catalog: your function space is either in it or it is not, and the difference reaches you as an absence, in a quarter where the enquiries were simply thinner than last year. So work out which of your corporate accounts run their travel through Navan — those are the offsites that will come this way first — and ask one of them to search your city in their events tool and tell you what comes back. That costs a phone call, and it is the only view you get of a door that opens from the other side.
Navan had been running this software on its own customers since February. Your function room was already on the other end of it.
Read also: Spotnana bought Troop to make the meetings RFP a booking · The hotel side of the corporate RFP just started automating too · The corporate hotel RFP is going AI-native
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