Navan vs Amex GBT: pricing, fees and which one fits your company

What is the difference between Navan and Amex GBT?

Navan is a software company that arranges travel. Amex GBT is a travel management company that ships software. Everything else follows from that. Navan built a product first and hired travel agents to stand behind it, which is why you can create an account, invite your team, and have someone book a flight before lunch without speaking to anyone at Navan. Amex GBT built a global servicing operation over decades, with travel professionals and business partners in more than 140 countries, and its booking tools exist to make that operation efficient.

The practical consequence is that you buy them differently. Navan is a self-serve signup with a published price that only becomes a negotiation once you pass 300 employees. Amex GBT is a negotiation from the first conversation, because the thing being priced is a service configured around your travel volume, your policy, your geographies and how much agent-assisted booking your travelers will actually do.

It also means the two are not really substitutes at every size. A 40-person US company that books thirty domestic flights a quarter is not the customer Amex GBT is built to serve, and a multinational with a rail-heavy European program and negotiated airline contracts is not going to be well served by a free tier. The interesting comparison happens in the middle, where a growing company is deciding whether it has outgrown software and needs a travel management company.

How much does Amex GBT cost?

Amex GBT does not publish a price. That is the honest answer and it is worth stating plainly, because a lot of pages that appear to answer this question are quoting benchmarking sites rather than the vendor. What Amex GBT does publish is a choice of four pricing models: flat fee, pay as you book, subscription, or custom terms, described on its own pricing page as options you pick to fit your budget and goals.

The models are meaningfully different from each other. Pay as you book is transaction-based, so you pay a fee each time somebody books, and Amex GBT notes that online transactions usually cost less than agent-assisted offline ones. A subscription is a monthly, quarterly or annual fee for a set of services, generally sized on the number of users, and the value improves the more a traveler leans on the travel management company. A flat fee gives you a predictable annual number regardless of booking activity. Custom terms are exactly what they sound like.

Because those models bill on different units, two companies with identical travel spend can end up with very different invoices depending on which one they picked. That is the actual work in an Amex GBT negotiation, and it is why the vendor will ask about your booking mix before quoting. Ask specifically what counts as a transaction, what an agent-assisted booking costs against an online one, and whether there is a minimum. Our corporate travel software pricing comparison sets the published prices from nine other vendors alongside this, which at least gives you a range to argue from.

• Flat fee: one predictable annual number, regardless of how much you book
• Pay as you book: a fee per transaction, cheaper online than agent-assisted
• Subscription: monthly, quarterly or annual, usually sized on users
• Custom terms: negotiated against your specific program
• No published dollar figure exists for any of the four

Is Navan cheaper than Amex GBT?

For a US company under 300 employees, almost certainly, because Navan Business is free at that size and Amex GBT is not free at any size. Navan charges nothing for travel on the Business tier, no cap on trips, and describes the access as funded by travel providers commission fees rather than by you. The only published Navan cost at that scale is expense: free for the first five monthly expensing users, then $15 per user per month. A 60-person company where twenty people file in a normal month pays $225 a month, or $2,700 a year, and nothing at all for travel.

Above 300 employees the comparison stops being clean. Navan moves you onto a quoted Enterprise contract, and Enterprise is also where Navan puts corporate negotiated rates. At that point you are comparing two custom quotes, and the honest answer to which is cheaper is that it depends entirely on your booking mix. A program where travelers happily self-serve online will look cheap under a pay-as-you-book model. A program where people call an agent for half their trips will not.

There is a second cost most comparisons miss, which is the cost of getting a price at all. Navan takes an afternoon. An Amex GBT evaluation is a procurement exercise with discovery calls, a volume analysis and a contract review. For a company with a procurement function that is normal overhead. For a twelve-person startup it is a week of somebody senior, and that time is not free either.

Which is better for a small or mid-size US company?

Navan, for most companies under a couple of hundred people, and it is not particularly close. The free tier removes the decision risk entirely, the signup is self-serve, and Navan staffs its own 24/7 travel agents on that free tier, which is the part people assume must be a paid feature. If it does not suit you, you have lost nothing.

Amex GBT does have a small and mid-market answer in Amex GBT Egencia, the platform it acquired and now sells as its mid-market product. Egencia is also quote-only, with no published pricing, and Amex GBT has announced a next-generation Egencia for 2026 that adds agentic AI search alongside an SAP Concur Expense integration. If your company already runs Concur for expense, that pairing is a genuine reason to look, and the two vendors have been building it deliberately: their Complete alliance, announced in October 2025, ties booking, servicing, payment and expensing together.

The size at which the calculation flips is usually the point where three things become true at once: you book enough volume that negotiated rates would actually save money, you have travelers in enough countries that servicing hours matter, and somebody internally is spending real time on travel. Below that, a free platform with agents behind it is hard to argue with. Above it, a travel management company earns its fee. Our write-up of a travel management company against travel software works through where that line usually falls.

• Under about 100 employees, mostly domestic: Navan free tier
• Already running Concur for expense: look at Amex GBT Egencia
• Negotiated airline or hotel contracts you own: Amex GBT
• No procurement function and no time for an RFP: Navan
• Travelers in many countries needing local servicing hours: Amex GBT
• You want a price before a sales call: Navan

Is Amex GBT being sold, and does that matter?

Yes, and it is worth knowing before you sign a multi-year contract. On 4 May 2026, Long Lake agreed to acquire Global Business Travel Group for $9.50 a share in cash, valuing the company at about $6.3 billion, with support from General Catalyst and Alpha Wave and from shareholders collectively representing 69 percent of the shares. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, and the announcement states that the American Express brand licensing agreement remains in place, which is the detail most clients care about.

That follows a busy period. Amex GBT completed its acquisition of CWT on 2 September 2025 for approximately $540 million on a cash-free, debt-free basis, with about $155 million of annual run-rate synergies identified over three years. The integration is showing up in results: Q1 2026 revenue of $840 million was up 35 percent, transactions grew 41 percent, and the company reported 96 percent customer retention with $3.4 billion of new wins.

How much any of this should worry you depends on your contract length. Ownership changes at travel management companies tend to affect account teams, service-level structures and technology roadmaps more than they affect whether a flight gets booked. The reasonable move is not to avoid the vendor, it is to ask what happens to your named account team and your service levels through the transition, and to get the answer written into the agreement. Navan sits on the other side of the same question: it listed on Nasdaq on 30 October 2025 at $25.00 a share, which put its financials on public record and largely retired the old objection that it was a private company of unknown stability.

What neither Navan nor Amex GBT does

Neither one plans the trip. Both give a traveler a policy-filtered search and wait for choices, and Amex GBT will put a skilled human counselor on the phone to help make them. What nobody does is the sequencing work: which flight actually fits around the meetings, whether the second city needs its own hotel or a longer commute, how the return leg lines up with the last commitment of the trip. That is roughly an hour per trip, it never appears in any pricing model, and it is done by the traveler or their assistant at whatever their hourly cost happens to be.

Neither one rebooks a canceled flight without a human in the loop either. Amex GBT is genuinely excellent at this, because a counselor who has done it ten thousand times is fast. But someone still works the problem, and the rest of the itinerary quietly stops making sense while they do: the hotel night that no longer lines up, the dinner on the wrong evening, the connection that is now impossible.

TripAgent.ai exists for the company that recognizes both of those costs and does not want to buy a travel program to solve them. You describe the trip in a sentence and the AI plans the day-by-day itinerary, books the flights, hotels and activities inside the budget and policy rules you set once, and when a flight falls through it finds an alternative, rebooks the traveler and reshuffles the days that no longer fit. It is a flat subscription from $19 a month, with no percentage on any booking and no per-transaction fee. Try it in the demo at the top of this page with a trip you actually need to take.

The honest limits, so nobody is surprised later: TripAgent.ai issues no corporate cards, runs no expense reconciliation, carries no negotiated corporate rates and staffs no human agent desk. If any of those is the thing you are shopping for, buy Navan or Amex GBT. If what you want is trips planned, booked and fixed without anyone owning that job internally, start with small business travel management, or read the honest write-up of where Amex GBT Egencia ends and we begin.