Navan vs. a Boutique TMC: What Mid-Size Companies Actually Get

Navan is easy to pitch. The product is modern, the demo looks clean, and the pricing is compelling. A lot of mid-size companies sign up expecting a technology-forward travel program with solid agent support — and for a while, that's what they get.

Then something changes.

We talk to a lot of companies that came to us from Navan. The stories are remarkably consistent: the tool is fine, the pricing is still attractive, but the service experience deteriorated. Hold times got longer. Agents got less experienced. The Concur connector disappeared. And the account manager — if there was one — stopped being proactive.

This post isn't a hit piece on Navan. It's an honest look at what the two models actually deliver for companies spending $100K–$2M annually on travel — and where the tradeoffs land.

Navan started as a travel booking tool and expanded into expense management. That's the core of its product strategy: one platform for travel and expense, with the booking interface as the front door. It's a genuinely good booking tool — modern interface, good mobile app, real-time inventory. For straightforward domestic travel, it works well.

What Navan is not, and has never positioned itself as, is a service-first company. The agent layer was always secondary to the technology. And in recent years, that gap has widened: Navan significantly reduced its agent team and introduced an AI assistant to handle support requests. For companies whose travelers occasionally need a human to sort something out quickly — at the gate, mid-trip, during a complex rebooking — that shift matters.

The other thing Navan is not is neutral on expense. Navan wants you using its expense tool. In 2024, it removed its SAP Concur connector — the integration that allowed Navan travel bookings to flow directly into Concur for expense reporting. For companies that use Concur expense and cannot switch (including every company in regulated healthcare that relies on Concur for Sunshine Act compliance), that decision created a manual reconciliation problem that didn't exist before.

Here's a direct comparison across the dimensions that matter most for mid-size companies:

This one deserves its own section because it's consequential for a specific but significant group of companies.

SAP Concur has built-in compliance reporting integrations that many companies in regulated industries cannot replicate elsewhere. Healthcare and life sciences companies that report under the Sunshine Act — which covers transfers of value to physicians and teaching hospitals — rely on Concur's connection to the Open Payments database. There is no other expense platform with that integration at scale.

For those companies, the choice to use Navan for travel and Concur for expense was straightforward — until Navan pulled the connector. Now every booking made in Navan has to be manually entered into Concur. That's admin time nobody budgeted for, on top of the disruption of a change that came with very little notice.

If your company uses Concur for expense and relies on the travel bookings flowing in automatically, this is a real operational problem with Navan. It's not a minor inconvenience — it's a workflow that breaks every time a trip is booked.

This is the thing that's hardest to put a number on but the easiest to feel. Agent quality is the difference between a disruption that gets solved in twelve minutes and one that takes forty-five — or doesn't get solved at all.

When Navan scaled up, it had genuinely good agents. Experienced, responsive, capable of handling complex itineraries and international rebookings under pressure. As the company shifted its focus toward the expense product and introduced AI-driven support, the agent tier thinned out. The agents who remain are often newer, handling higher volume, and working from a different playbook than the ones who built Navan's early reputation.

At Telios, the agent team is led by Angelica Vasco — who has been in the travel industry for over 30 years. Every agent on the team is named, dedicated, and has the kind of institutional knowledge that only comes from years of doing the work. When your traveler calls at 9pm with a rebooking problem, they're talking to someone who has seen this before.

That's not a marketing claim. It's a staffing decision that has real consequences for your travelers when things go wrong.

We said this post isn't a hit piece, so here's the honest version: Navan is a reasonable choice for some companies.

If your travel is primarily domestic, your travelers are relatively self-sufficient in a booking tool, your volume is high enough to justify the platform investment, and your expense management doesn't depend on Concur — Navan's technology-forward model can work well. The booking interface is genuinely good and the pricing is competitive.

The companies who struggle with Navan tend to share a few characteristics:

• Executive or VIP travelers who need a human agent they can rely on
• International travel with complex routing or regional carrier bookings
• Concur-dependent expense workflows that require booking data to flow automatically
• Travel managers or EAs who need a proactive partner, not a ticket queue
• Companies at $100K–$2M in spend who don't get prioritized by enterprise-scale platforms

If two or more of those describe your company, the comparison tips clearly toward a boutique TMC.

One of the reasons companies stay with a TMC they're unhappy with is the perceived cost of switching. It feels disruptive. The reality is that switching from Navan (or any TMC) to Telios is straightforward:

If you already use SAP Concur, the technical transfer takes one day. The surrounding work — policy review, traveler profile migration, vendor rate uploads — takes a few additional days. Most companies are fully live within two weeks of signing. There's no minimum contract term and no lock-in — 30 days written notice to terminate if it's not working.

Navan built a compelling product. But product and service are different things, and for mid-size companies in the $100K–$2M spend range, the service layer is where the program lives or dies. Most companies don't have a dedicated travel manager — they have an EA, a finance director, or an ops person managing travel on top of everything else. Those people need a TMC that owns the program, not a platform they have to manage themselves.

That's what a boutique TMC offers that a tech-first platform doesn't. Not better software — better people. A named agent who picks up in three rings. An account manager who brings savings opportunities to you instead of waiting for you to ask. A program that runs without you having to run it.

If you're in the "learning what's out there" stage — or you've already decided Navan isn't working and you want to see what a boutique TMC looks like for your company — contact us. We'll give you a straight answer about whether Telios is the right fit. You can also read our full Navan vs. Telios comparison or our guide to switching your TMC.