Phase Genomics streamlines travel, expense, and card on one trusted platform.

Time-consuming travel bookings made across the web

Phase Genomics attends around 10 conferences per year, sending between 2 and 5 people to each. Prior to using Brex travel, COO Kayla Young essentially acted as the company travel manager and booked employee trips manually through individual consumer travel sites like Hotels.com, Bookings.com, or individual conference websites.

“We are always striving to be as capital-efficient as possible. It’s one of the many hats I get to wear — playing travel agent — managing up to 50 trips every year, but it’s very time-consuming,” Kayla said. She would search multiple sites to find the best rates, then book accommodations for each traveler and manually pass the itinerary off to them. This system of mostly ad hoc flight and hotel bookings made it difficult to manage, track, or help address anything that happened after booking.

Booking employee travel took Kayla away from the more strategic parts of her job, and it was all very difficult to manage. “I spent a lot of time on Hotels.com or Expedia, or wherever we could to find the best rates. We run on a tight budget, but I also don’t want to put my people in a bad place, so I’m constantly floating across that line. Bookings were just all over the place.”

A user-friendly travel program integrated with Brex cards and expense management

Phase Genomics has been a Brex customer since 2017, streamlining all corporate card and expense management processes since its early days. “We've been using Brex cards and spend management for so long,” Kayla said. “I love that it's always been a one-stop shop. It was a no-brainer to add Brex travel.”

When Brex travel rolled out, Kayla started booking and managing Phase Genomics's hotels through the Brex platform as well. Always diligent about making every dollar count for the company, Kayla always compares prices across Brex travel, conference websites, and other consumer booking tools. “Brex is usually the same price or better, so I book through Brex because it keeps everything centralized.”

Brex travel also allows users to input personal loyalty numbers to preferred airlines to reap the benefits of those programs on top of earning up to 4x points on every Brex travel purchase made using a Brex card. When booking for conferences, Kayla simply plugs the convention center address into Brex travel and filters by budget and refundable options only, according to her booking policies. This saves her time and money.

She’ll also save by using Brex points to book if available; otherwise, she’ll complete the booking with her Brex card on the conference’s spend limit. Now, trips are integrated with the rest of the Brex platform for easier expenses, too. “Being able to book everything through the Brex portal keeps me a little more centered; the credit cards are uploaded already, and I can easily attach names to bookings. With travel and expense data seamlessly connected, reconciliation becomes that much faster.”

“Brex adds a whole new level of efficiency to travel and expense management.”

— Kayla Young, PhD, COO, Phase Genomics

10% reduced travel spend on a consolidated platform employees trust

For Kayla, Brex travel has enabled her to book travel much faster, make any changes, and organize itineraries in one place for visibility and simplified tracking. On a platform that’s easy to use and with rates she feels confident about, Kayla enjoys the cost- and time-savings that are achieved through centralizing where bookings are made. “Brex travel has a smooth interface, so it’s easier to find the hotels and airfare we need with the right prices.”

Kayla leverages the traveler’s information already stored in Brex for faster booking, then tracks any changes made all the way through the trip. On top of that, travelers are automatically notified when a trip has been booked for them. “Teammates can log in to their Brex accounts and see the itinerary right away. And being able to assign a traveler to a trip is really nice, versus me just manually plugging in traveler details in Hotels.com, where the traveler gets some sort of email notification and I don't have any tracking on it.”

Because Brex travel is easy to use and allows employees to do self-serve bookings and itinerary management, Kayla plans to empower everyone at Phase Genomics on the platform and maybe hang up her travel agent hat once and for all. She said the biggest impact of Brex travel, however, has been the consolidation of their travel program with the rest of their expenses, cards, and spend.

“Everyone from the C-suite to individual contributors knows and loves their Brex accounts,” Kayla shares. “They have their credit cards and run reimbursements, so being able to add travel booking in Brex is really nice.” Allowing employees to access and manage travel-related workflows within an easy-to-use platform that they already enjoy has also made adoption smooth. “With Brex, employees never have to guess where to go for information or to make changes. They can book and manage travel and expenses all in one platform.”

The benefits of a consolidated travel, expense, and card platform reach far beyond the end user, though. “Brex travel has reduced our travel spend by approximately 10%,” Kayla says. Even more than that, she appreciates the 2 hours every month she's regained from booking and managing travel to focus on higher-priority tasks. “I deal in HubSpot; I deal in QuickBooks; I deal in Carta; I deal in Atlassian. As COO, I live across so many different spaces, so the true value to me is just having one platform I can go to and get it all done. Brex adds a whole new level of efficiency to travel and expense management.”