Kaligo.com partners with Visa to reward commercial cardholders and help companies manage travel expenses

SINGAPORE - Visa and Kaligo.com, a leading global hotel booking platform that rewards frequent travellers with thousands of airline miles or credit card points on every booking, announced a strategic alliance to help businesses and corporations with their hotel bookings. Kaligo Business Plus provides Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with an easy and intuitive travel tool that enables them to earn highly accelerated rewards, reduce costs and manage travel expenses. The rewards-centric hotel booking solution provides Visa and Card Issuers with product differentiation, deeper SME engagement and greater travel policy compliance.

The benefits for SMEs are compelling:
- Delight employees - Reward business travellers with thousands of attractive miles and points on their hotel bookings, so they can fly for free on their next holiday
- Reduce travel spend - Easily set daily rate limits by city and by employee category, reflecting the desired travel policy
- Get powerful insights - Quickly view reports to see the entire company's booking activity in one place, and export data to feed into other SME tools for accounting or analysis
- Boost policy compliance - Leverage Kaligo's rich rewards to drive more spend compliance on the Visa commercial card.

More SMEs are now moving away from relying on traditional travel agents and allowing their staff to book their own travel. It is this band of frequent travellers - business executives, sales representatives, those who travel regularly for work - Kaligo is targeting. In a study commissioned by Visa and conducted by RFi Group, it is estimated that between three percent and five percent of all business expenses are on travel[1].

Kaligo Business Plus makes it convenient to find the ideal business hotel with tailored review scores and special filters for business travellers. Companies can easily configure travel policies and realise cost savings. In just a few clicks, an administrator can create employee profiles within the company's Kaligo Business Plus account. Tracking company spend by employee category or team is easy with real-time dashboards and reports.

Vikram Kshettry, Head of Small Business Products, Asia Pacific of Visa said, "We are very pleased to partner with Kaligo. The tailored Kaligo Business Plus proposition drives key benefits for issuers, Visa and SMEs. This exclusive offer to Visa cardholders provides cost savings for companies and convenience for business travellers. We will be working with over 60 Visa Issuers in Asia Pacific to communicate and promote Kaligo Business Plus to their Eligible Visa Cardholders."

Kyle Armstrong, CEO of Kaligo.com said, "We are delighted to work with Visa on this initiative. The combination of Kaligo's broad inventory of 365,000 hotels, our wide range of rewards program options and Visa's extensive reach that connects consumers, businesses and financial institutions in more than 200 markets to fast, secure and reliable electronic payments, yields compelling benefits for SMEs. Our offering allows SMEs to reduce their travel spend, gain powerful insights and boost policy compliance."

"We are delighted to be the first bank to partner with VISA and support their collaboration with Kaligo to launch Kaligo Business Plus. Citibank's VISA Commercial Cards clients in Singapore will benefit from Kaligo's hotel booking solution that allows them to better manage their corporate travel needs and at the same time, earn reward points of up to 25 times faster which can be used to redeem hotel stays and flights among other attractive offers," said John Denhof, Head of Cards and Personal Loans at Citibank Singapore.

[1] The Visa SME Payments Survey 2015 was conducted by RFi Group with close to 1,000 companies interviewed in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

sourced:traveldailynews.asia