Engineering Manager - K4B

KAYAK and Mesh partner to simplify Business Travel spend. Corporate travel has a stubborn problem: booking the trip is often easier than accounting for it. The KAYAK Mesh partnership aims to close that gap by connecting travel booking, payments and expenses. KAYAK for Business and Mesh Payments have formed a strategic partnership to bring corporate travel booking, payments and expense management into one connected system. KAYAK handles travel planning and reservations, while Mesh provides corporate cards, spending controls and automated expense reconciliation. The companies are presenting it at Business Travel Show America in New York on October 14-15. However, the integration isn't scheduled to launch until December 2026. For now, this is a product announcement, not evidence of a proven solution. One trip, not three disconnected systems. By now, most businesses know the routine. An employee books a flight, pays for a taxi and later uploads receipts. Finance then tries to connect those charges to an approved trip. Instead, the new integration aims to reverse that process. Rather than reviewing spending after departure, companies can set limits before purchases happen. Travelers will book through KAYAK for Business, using direct supplier connections, NDC and traditional distribution systems. At checkout, Mesh can generate a trip-specific virtual card with an assigned budget and policy. Alternatively, companies can retain their existing corporate card arrangements. Then, purchases should flow into the same trip record. Mesh says its software will categorize transactions, match receipts and automate reconciliation. "Booking a business trip should be as easy as booking a personal one and visible to finance from the moment it starts," said Eva Fouquet, SVP of KAYAK for Business. "With Mesh, the booking, the card, and the expense all sit around a single trip. Travelers book with a tool they already know, and finance sees travel spend as it happens instead of figuring it out weeks later." What changes for travelers and finance. For travelers, the appeal is less administration. For finance teams, it's knowing what employees actually spend, not just what the itinerary originally cost. The companies highlight several practical features: * Booking: Search travel options and manage changes through KAYAK's corporate platform. * Payments: Use Mesh virtual cards or eligible existing corporate cards, with controls tied to company policy. * Expenses: Match transactions to travelers and trips automatically, reducing manual reports. * Visibility: Track spending during a trip rather than waiting for month-end reconciliation. * AI assistance: Build policy-aware itineraries through natural-language requests and automate expense categorization. Importantly, KAYAK combines conversational AI with conventional search. Human assistance also remains available when trips become complicated. However, automation still needs to prove itself outside a demonstration. Missing receipts, reimbursements, merchant errors and cross-border expenses can disrupt even well-designed workflows. Mesh says it can issue cards locally in more than 40 countries. Yet buyers should confirm their specific markets, supported card programs, accounting integrations and pricing before committing. Why the timing matters. More importantly, this is bigger than making expense reports disappear. Business travel is becoming a competition over who controls the entire spending journey. According to the Global Business Travel Association, worldwide business travel spending could reach $1.71 trillion in 2026. Meanwhile, Deloitte's 2026 corporate travel study found that surveyed companies' travel budgets rose faster than trip volumes. Managing leakage now matters as much as negotiating fares. That shift explains why competitors are converging. Navan already combines travel, card data and expense automation. Ramp links bookings with payment controls and reconciliation. Perk, formerly TravelPerk, also matches booking expenses to card transactions. Meanwhile, SAP Concur serves companies seeking established travel-and-expense workflows. So, KAYAK and Mesh aren't inventing a new category. Instead, they're trying to compete by joining KAYAK's familiar booking interface with Mesh's payments expertise. "Booking tells you what a trip is supposed to cost. Payment tells you what it actually costs," said Oded Zehavi, Co-Founder and CEO of Mesh Payments. "KAYAK for Business built the booking experience business travelers actually want to use. Mesh puts a card behind every trip with the budget and the policy already on it, so finance sees the real number as the trip happens rather than weeks later." What companies should examine. For mid-sized firms tired of spreadsheets and scattered receipts, this could be compelling. Likewise, global businesses may appreciate policy-linked virtual cards without replacing every existing bank relationship. Still, a consolidated dashboard doesn't automatically create a complete travel program. Companies with demanding negotiated fares, complex approvals or mature SAP ecosystems should compare support depth, integrations and total costs. Smaller teams with occasional trips may find the setup unnecessary. Ultimately, the real test will come after launch. Can the system handle cancellations, split payments, taxes and out-of-policy purchases without pushing work back onto employees? Conclusion: Payments are becoming part of travel management. The interesting change isn't that KAYAK has added another partner. It's that corporate travel platforms increasingly treat payment as part of the booking decision. Navan, Ramp and Perk are already moving in that direction. Therefore, KAYAK and Mesh will need to demonstrate more than a smooth checkout. They must prove that trip-level data remains accurate when travel gets messy. If they do, companies may stop measuring travel technology by how quickly employees book. Instead, they'll judge it by how little financial cleanup remains when everyone returns home.

Tech Tracker: xtraCHEF founders launch a new venture. The founders of Kayak are also back with a new AI travel company. Plus, updates from Crunchtime, PAR, and Presto. September 30, 2026 Andy Schwartz and Bhavik Patel founded Tandem, which will focus on AI agents. September is a time for returning. This is the month when people go back to school, to routine, or to their alma mater. So if you're a veteran tech founder, perhaps it makes sense to choose this month to announce that you're returning with a new venture. 4C Consulting Group, LLC has got not one but two of those in this month's edition of Tech Tracker. Plus, new products from Crunchtime and PAR and a key partnership for Presto. Here 4C Consulting Group, LLC go! Kayak founders launch an AI travel agent. Steve Hafner and Paul English are the brains behind Lola, an AI assistant that aims to not only help users decide where to go, stay and eat, but also book everything for them. Consumers can talk to Lola like a chatbot to help plan and book trips, including dining. It remembers users' preferences and can provide personalized recommendations. Lola is free, but customers can upgrade to paid tiers to get better hotel rates, dining access, and other perks. Hafner and English founded the travel booking site Kayak in 2004. Their new venture is owned by Booking Holdings, which also owns Kayak, OpenTable, and other booking sites. xtraCHEF founders return with AI restaurant agents. Andrew Schwartz and Bhavik Patel sold xtraCHEF, a back-office automation system, to Toast in 2021, and spent a few years working for the company before moving on to other things. Now they're back with a new restaurant tech company, Tandem, which will offer AI agents designed to help operators run their business. In a press release, the company said its agents could be assigned to a wide range of tasks, including finance, labor, purchasing, inventory, and marketing. Tandem has closed a seed financing round and is working with operators across 100 locations in a pilot program. It also brought in celebrity chef Michael Schulson as a founding partner to lend an operator's perspective to the company. Crunchtime comes to the KDS. Crunchtime is bringing its restaurant operations software to the kitchen display screen. The new system will integrate Crunchtime Kitchen, Crunchtime Ops Execution, and Crunchtime Inventory tools into the kitchen staff's usual workflow, turning display screens into "a unified operational command center." In addition to showing active orders, screens will be able to prompt employees when to prep something, for instance. Workers will also be able to log waste on the KDS, which will automatically update Crunchtime inventory. The new system marks a major step in the integration between Crunchtime and QSR Automations, the KDS supplier. The two companies announced a merger last year. PAR looks to ID more customers. The POS provider launched Guest360, a new product designed to help restaurants identify customers that are not part of a loyalty program. Most restaurant transactions come from non-loyalty members at the counter, drive-thru, or kiosk. Guest360 allows restaurants to create profiles for those anonymous customers using a technology it calls Profile Stitching. Restaurants can then market to these customers through an integration between Guest360 and Punchh, PAR's loyalty system. The new product builds on PAR's acquisition this year of Bridg, which uses credit card info and other data to create a profile of otherwise anonymous customers. Guest360 is now live with some Punchh customers and will expand to the rest of the Punchh customer base this year. Presto integrates with Toast. The AI voice supplier for drive-thrus is joining forces with the POS supplier, which recently launched a drive-thru system. Restaurants that use both Toast Drive-Thru can and Presto will be able to connect the two systems, so that orders handled by Presto will flow seamlessly into the POS. While Presto has primarily focused on large chains like Taco John's and Dairy Queen, partnering with Toast could bring it to smaller brands. Senior editor, Restaurant Business Joe Guszkowski is a senior editor with Restaurant Business covering technology and casual-dining chains. Subscribe Nation's Restaurant News Newsletters