Engine
- Founder and CEO: Elia Wallen
- Headquarters: Denver
- Last Funding Round: 2024
- Valuation as of Last Funding Round: $2.1 billion
Engine EVP of supply, product and strategy Florent Silve
Over the past decade, booking platform Engine has grown from a corporate housing platform's side project into a multi-billion business aiming to bridge the gap between online travel agencies and travel management companies for small and midsize travel programs.
Corporate housing company Travelers Haven launched Hotel Engine as a subsidiary in 2015 to assist guests with hotel bookings, and it split off as its own company a few years later. Since then, the company has undergone three funding rounds—most recently its $140 million Series C funding round in 2024, which raised its valuation to $2.1 billion—and rapid growth in product and features. Travelers Haven founder Elia Wallen moved over to serve as the company's CEO fulltime in 2020—Travelers Haven itself was acquired by furnished apartment rental provider Blueground in 2023—and the company this month said it has grown from 700 employees at the start of this year to more than 1,000 today.
Over its history, Engine has built direct partnerships with most of the largest hotel groups in the world—including Hilton, IHG, Wyndham, Choice, Hyatt, Best Western and Oyo—as well as large property management groups in North America and reports exclusive rates available at more than 85,000 hotels, according to a company spokesperson. The company claims growth of 23,000 travelers joining per month.
As Wallen described it in an interview with "Fortune" last year, "the little brother became the big brother."
The Engine platform was built "to deliver the intuitive booking experience of most modern travel platforms but with a lot of the product features traditionally reserved for large managed travel programs," Engine EVP of supply, product and strategy Florent Silve said. Those features include centralized billing, policy controls, dashboards and reporting. Engine also negotiates with chains and directly with hotels to provide special rates with clients they would not be able to procure on their own, he said.
Generally, Engine "doesn’t bump into the TMCs" with customers, as its clients typically don't have TMC relationships, Silve said. Some of its clients have migrated away from TMCs in favor of self-service, while others have never had any kind of tool for travel management for their company, he said.
With that target clientele, the Covid-19 pandemic "was a turning point" for Engine's growth, according to Silve. "Many of our customers had dedicated staffing pre-Covid, and then someone in HR or finance was told they were not going to rehire that travel manager, so now they had to do this on top of everything else," he said.
Last year, Engine dropped the "Hotel" from its name as it expanded its capabilities to offer flight and car rental bookings, as its customers wanted a "one-stop shop" for travel, Silve said. As with its hotel content, the flight and car content comes from a variety of sources, including direct supplier integrations, aggregators, GDSs and New Distribution Capability sources.
Engine does not require its corporate customers to sign long-term contracts or commit to any spend minimums. It earns its revenues through transaction fees as well as optional products customers can use in bookings. Among those products is its "Flex" booking option, in which travelers can change or cancel their hotel reservations without penalty even if it's outside a hotel's policy window. It also sells a "FlexPro" option through which customers can subscribe to that capability on a monthly or annual basis.
In 2024, Flex and FlexPro bookings accounted for 40 percent of its total bookings and 70 percent of total customer spending and contributed to $202 million in savings for customers, according to Engine. It expanded the capability to flights this year.
Engine also is broadening its focus on group travel, and it has products and services for its hotel partners, helping them with sales and marketing efforts, and it also can help hotels respond to group requests for proposals.
"We have full-stack solutions to help hotels reach and optimize their distribution within the ecosystem of SMBs," Silve said. "They have that with OTAs, but it's a very different customer base."
The unmanaged SME market is viewed as a lucrative target—American Express Global Business Travel, for example, has estimated its value at $834 billion globally—and Silve said Engine has invested heavily in sales efforts over the years to find out how best to reach the decision-makers in that market and has opened sales hubs in Chicago and Tempe, Ariz., as well as its headquarters city of Denver. The company also has offices in San Francisco and New York.
"With the brand recognition improving, we have more self-serve and product-led growth, and we're pushing for that direction, but for the most part, it remains with our sales efforts," Silve said. "A lot of companies have tried to go down-market and realized it's not that easy, so that's where we're building something pretty special."