When you host an all-company NYC offsite each year, dozens of team gatherings in places like New Orleans, Salt Lake City, and Manchester, UK, and partner events at major moments like the Super Bowl and the US Open, travel is more than a line item – it's part of company culture.
That's what travel means to SeatGeek, where gatherings bring together a 800-person remote team from all around the world.
But as the company grew, it was also outgrowing its travel workflow. Getting group rates for their biggest gatherings took dedicated staff and hours of manual work. Smaller team trips were often coordinated ad-hoc by employees who weren't planning experts. And when plans changed late in the process, last-minute bookings drove up costs with high nightly room rates.
SeatGeek's finance team routinely saw these missed opportunities and unnecessary charges, but only after expenses were submitted and decisions were already locked in.
With thousands of rooms booked across the organization every year, SeatGeek needed a way to simplify operations, improve visibility, and leverage their size into buying power for travel accommodations. Here's how Workgrounds made that possible.
1Making Group Rates More Accessible
SeatGeek was partnering with a travel booker that worked well for individual travel. But large group travel like offsites, summits, and partner events required a separate, time-intensive process of manual RFPs, negotiations, and contract review. When teams booked trips independently, there was no consistent policy to guide them, leaving non-expert planners to coordinate multi-room bookings without the leverage or time to finesse a group rate.
"Coordinating team travel was eating time and leaving money on the table. We needed a way to maximize group rates and roll that out across the company."
Many companies might respond to this kind of challenge by adding more approvals or centralizing planning under a single team. SeatGeek took a different approach. They partnered with Workgrounds to make group travel simple and self-serve – something that doesn't require specialized knowledge or create new dependencies. Using Workgrounds' AI-powered platform, teams across the organization can now source hotel room blocks through a guided workflow that automatically leverages the company's scale and buying power.
As a result, SeatGeek has captured group rates across more than 2,500 room nights, captured over 30% savings on room rates, and turned what was once a high-effort win into a consistent, repeatable outcome.
2Cutting the Busywork Out of Group Travel
Manual group bookings meant that all of SeatGeek's team travel plans started from scratch: sending RFPs, chasing hotel responses, looping in legal for contract review, and coordinating confirmations, changes, and payments across teams. That effort made group rates a heavy lift, so even when the spend justified it, individuals often defaulted to easier but more expensive retail pricing for rooms.
Workgrounds stripped this friction out of the process. Hotel sourcing and bid comparisons now happen automatically, and payments are consolidated onto one card for each room-block, reducing folio accumulation and making T&E review and reconciliation significantly easier. And because confirmations, rooming lists, and changes are managed in one system, planners can handle inevitable last-minute updates without email chains or guesswork.
"By simplifying both the front end of booking and the back end of reconciliation, we cut the hours spent organizing group travel dramatically. What used to take weeks of coordination now largely runs itself."
3Building Visibility and Control Into Bookings
With managers, EAs, and employee experience teams planning group travel across the company, SeatGeek needed a process that didn't depend on travel or procurement expertise. That reality burdened employees and introduced real financial risk. Without early visibility into who was traveling or how many rooms were being committed, finance often didn't see the cost of a trip until bookings were already locked in and budgets were harder to course-correct.
"Visibility is what turns group travel into a predictable category for finance teams. One of the benefits of Workgrounds is that it gives these teams early insights and oversight throughout, so they can manage travel budgets without taking away the speed and autonomy of self-serve booking."
Workgrounds also brings visibility to the start of the planning process. Pre-planning tools like retail rate comparison, alternative date selector, flight estimator, and HRIS integrations make capacity prediction and projected spend clear before blocks are finalized, which ensures group rates are applied to every qualifying trip and room blocks are sized accurately. As a result, SeatGeek now fills room blocks at over 95% capacity, dramatically reducing exposure to attrition and minimizing wasted spend.
4The Result
Group travel is now predictable, manageable, and cost-efficient at SeatGeek. Finance can forecast spend and control exposure, planners keep the flexibility to book independently, and the company consistently captures the maximum value of every large gathering.
Supporting a Culture of Travel at Scale
How SeatGeek simplified team travel through visibility and unlocked group buying power across the organization.
