Navan vs Egencia: pricing, ownership and which one fits your company

What is the difference between Navan and Egencia?

Navan sells software. Egencia sells a managed travel program. Both let an employee book a flight from a screen, and that surface similarity is what puts them on the same shortlist, but the businesses underneath are different shapes. Navan makes travel free at the point of use, funds it through the commissions travel providers already pay, and charges you for the expense product on top. Egencia charges you a fee to service the booking, and that fee buys the things a travel management company does: negotiated content, agents, duty of care, unused ticket recovery and a program someone is accountable for.

The practical consequence shows up in how you buy. You can be booking on Navan Business this afternoon with a company email address and no conversation. Egencia starts with a demo request, and Egencia states implementation takes about a week after that. Neither is the right answer in general. If travel is a line item nobody owns and you need it under control by Friday, a procurement cycle is the problem rather than the solution. If travel is a seven-figure category with contracted airline fares and a compliance obligation attached, software you switch on yourself is not what you were shopping for.

The second consequence is what happens when a trip breaks. Navan includes its own 24/7 travel agents on the free Business tier, which is genuinely unusual at that price. Egencia gives you agent servicing too, but charges for it in the transaction fee, and prices agent-assisted bookings above self-service ones. That is the same service billed two different ways, and which one is cheaper depends entirely on how often your travelers pick up the phone.

How much does Egencia cost compared to Navan?

Nobody outside an Egencia contract can tell you, and that is the single most useful sentence on this page. Egencia publishes no list price, no tier structure and no per-booking figure. What it does publish is a proportion: that on average its fees account for less than four percent of a company's overall travel spend. Read that carefully, because it is an average across Egencia's own book of business, it measures fees as a share of total travel spend rather than a fee per trip, and it is not a commitment about your quote. It is a sanity check, and a good one. If you spend $500,000 a year on travel and the numbers you are shown imply $35,000 in fees, that is outside what Egencia itself describes as typical and you are entitled to say so.

Navan's side of the comparison is short because it is public. A 120-person US company pays nothing for travel, because Business is free up to 300 employees with no limit on trips. If 30 of those people file expenses in a normal month, the first five are free and the other 25 cost $15 each, so $375 a month or $4,500 a year, and the bill moves with how many people actually file rather than headcount. Corporate negotiated rates are not part of that. They sit under the quoted Enterprise tier, which is a common misreading of Navan's pricing page.

So the honest framing is not cheaper against more expensive. It is a known cost against an unknown one, for products that do different amounts of work. The way to make the comparison real is to get the Egencia quote expressed as an annual total including your expected online and offline booking mix, then set that against $0 for travel plus whatever Navan Expense costs at your filing volume. Our guides to what Egencia costs and what Navan costs go through both in detail, and the corporate travel software pricing page lines up ten vendors side by side.

Is Egencia owned by Amex?

Yes. Egencia is American Express Global Business Travel's mid-market brand, and the product is now marketed as Amex GBT Egencia. That matters commercially rather than cosmetically, because the pricing you will be offered comes out of the parent's playbook. Amex GBT publishes four pricing models and no figures at all: a flat fee, pay as you book, a subscription billed monthly, quarterly or annually and usually sized on number of users, or custom terms. Working out which of those four you are being steered toward is most of the negotiation, because each one rewards a different booking pattern.

There is a bigger ownership story running underneath, and it is worth knowing before you sign a multi-year contract. Amex GBT completed its acquisition of CWT in September 2025 for approximately $540 million cash-free and debt-free. Then on 4 May 2026 it agreed to be acquired by Long Lake for $9.50 a share in cash, valuing the group at about $6.3 billion, backed by General Catalyst and Alpha Wave, with holders of roughly 69 percent of shares supporting the deal. It is expected to close in the second half of 2026, and the American Express brand licensing agreement remains in place.

None of that is a reason to avoid Egencia. Consolidation is normal in this industry and the company is performing: first quarter 2026 revenue of $840 million, up 35 percent, with 96 percent customer retention and transaction growth of 41 percent. But a take-private changes who sets the roadmap and the renewal terms, and the fair thing to do is ask about it. Navan has its own version of the same question, having listed publicly in October 2025, which brings a different kind of pressure on pricing.

Is Egencia a travel agency?

It is a travel management company, which is a travel agency built for corporate programs rather than for holidays. The distinction is real. A leisure agency sells you a trip. A travel management company runs your travel as a program: it holds your policy, applies your negotiated fares, tracks where your people are, services changes through agents, recovers value from tickets nobody flew, and reports on all of it. Egencia does that work through the Amex GBT group, which is the largest in the market, and it is what the booking fee pays for.

Where the label gets confusing is that Egencia also sells booking technology that looks like software. Travelers self-serve on a screen, and Egencia deliberately prices those self-service bookings below agent-assisted ones to push volume online. So you get the software experience and the agency underneath it, and you pay for both in one transaction fee. If you only wanted the software, you are paying for capability you will not use, which is the honest case for a self-serve platform at smaller sizes.

Egencia also runs a Savings Finder that automatically rebooks air and hotel when the rate drops after you have booked. That is agency work automated, and it is one of the better arguments for the fee, because it recovers money you would otherwise never notice you had lost.

• Contracted airline fares you have negotiated yourself: Egencia
• Live this week with no procurement cycle: Navan
• Under about 100 employees with no travel manager: Navan
• A compliance obligation that names a duty of care provider: Egencia
• You want the travel bill to be $0 and the expense bill to be predictable: Navan
• High offline booking mix with complex international itineraries: Egencia
• Nobody at the company owns travel today: Navan

Is Egencia a GDS?

No, and the difference is worth understanding because it changes what you are actually buying. A GDS, meaning a global distribution system such as Amadeus, Sabre or Travelport, is the wholesale plumbing that holds airline and hotel inventory and lets agencies sell it. Egencia is a booking platform and travel management company that sits on top of that plumbing, aggregating content from an average of 290 airlines and presenting it with your policy, your approvals and your reporting wrapped around it.

This comes up on shortlists because buyers hear that a platform is GDS-connected and assume that settles the content question. It does not. What matters is which sources a platform actually pulls from, because airline content increasingly arrives through direct connections and NDC channels rather than the traditional GDS alone, and low-cost carriers have never been fully represented there. The useful question for either vendor is not whether they touch a GDS. It is whether the specific carriers your people fly, including the budget ones on your regional routes, show up in the search results with the fares you would find on the airline's own site.

Ask both vendors that in the same words and compare the answers against three real routes your company flies. It is a five-minute test and it tells you more than any feature grid.

Which is better for a small business, Navan or Egencia?

For a small business, Navan, and it is not close on the numbers that a small business can see. Travel is free under 300 employees, expense is free for the first five monthly filers, you can start today, and 24/7 travel agents are included rather than metered. Egencia is built for programs with enough spend that negotiated content and agent servicing pay for the fee, and it does not publish a price, does not offer a free tier and does not offer a trial. A 25-person company would be entering a quote process to buy capability it will not use for years.

The size at which that flips is roughly where two things become true at once. First, you have enough travel volume that airlines and hotels will negotiate directly with you, and you need a partner to load and police those rates. Second, someone at the company has travel in their job title, because a managed program needs an owner on your side to be worth what it costs. Below that, the honest recommendation is a self-serve platform, and the fair comparison is not Navan against Egencia at all but Navan against the other self-serve options in corporate travel management software.

There is a third answer that neither vendor sells, and it is worth naming because it is the thing most small teams actually lose time to. Both Navan and Egencia are excellent at the moment of booking and neither one plans the trip. Deciding which flights, which nights, how the meetings sequence and whether the second city needs a hotel is an hour of somebody's week on every trip, and it never appears on an invoice. TripAgent.ai does that part: describe the trip in a sentence, and it builds the day-by-day itinerary, books it inside the budget and rules you set once, and rebooks when a flight is canceled. It is a flat subscription from $19 a month and it does not issue cards or run an expense close, which is why teams often run it alongside a spend platform rather than instead of one.