BOSTON & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 4, 2025--
TravelPerk today announced its rebrand to Perk, launching a new platform that unites travel and spend management in one seamless, AI-native experience. The rebrand also marks the next step in the company’s transformation, with a broader mission to eliminate the hidden, time-wasting tasks that drain productivity - from booking trips and filing expenses, to coding invoices and chasing approvals.
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Perk calls these tasks ‘shadow work’: the invisible, non-core work employees do outside their main job. New research conducted by Forrester Consulting, and commissioned by Perk, reveals that shadow work costs businesses $1.7 trillion a year across six major economies - the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. On average, every employee loses approximately seven hours per week to these tasks, and 11 minutes of focus every time they try to switch back to real work.
Perk’s intelligent platform now automates two thirds (67%) of the most frustrating non-core work, including booking travel for work, filing expenses, managing invoices and organizing team events. Unlike fragmented solutions, Perk delivers a single, global platform experience that enables companies to set the rules once and have them applied everywhere.
“More than a decade ago, we started by removing the friction from traveling for work,” says Avi Meir, Perk CEO and Co-Founder. “Over time, we realized those small, frustrating tasks people do outside of their core job weren’t just hiding in travel, they were everywhere. To truly solve the problem, we first had to grasp its scale, and the numbers from the research surprised even me. How can a 1,000 person company afford to lose around 7,000 hours to shadow work every week? Perk gives companies the fuel they need to make work simpler and give people their time back.”
Perk's mission to power real work is reinforced by its new Spend Management capability, an AI-native module, which automates the everyday shadow work - from expenses and invoices to card payments - that slows teams down. With Perk Pay companies can issue physical cards that simplify spending while keeping every transaction under company control. It centralizes oversight of company spending, reduces fraud risk, and automates expense reconciliation.
Learning from real-world trips, receipts, invoices, and payments, an in-house AI lab powers Perk to continuously learn from anonymised data and automate work faster and more accurately for 10,000 companies worldwide. Perk is built to deliver results from day one, with deep integrations and an open ecosystem that connects seamlessly with leading ERP, HRIS and expense tools - giving businesses flexibility to streamline operations and simplify workflows.
As Perk surpasses $300 million in annualized revenue, the company is establishing dual headquarters in Boston and London to reflect its global scale and ambition. With two strategic acquisitions in less than a year, Series E financing fueling innovation, significant AI investment, plus a footprint of over 1,800 employees across 12 global offices, the company is entering a new phase of accelerated growth.
By numbers: the hidden impact of shadow work on teams:
Approximately 67% of decision makers surveyed plan to reinvest the time saved through automation into growth and innovation.
Methodology:
The study included surveys of 721 decision-makers in finance, operations, HR, and IT, and 8,004 employees across the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.
About Perk
Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management, built to eliminate the hidden, manual tasks that drain productivity and morale - Perk calls these ‘Shadow Work’. By automating travel bookings, expenses and invoice processing, the platform gives teams back time to focus on real work, with real impact. Trusted by more than 10,000 companies worldwide - including Wise, On Running, Breitling and Fabletics - Perk is tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem revealed in The Cost of Shadow Work report. Founded in 2015, the global company combines innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work today and in the future. Perk’s mission is to power real work by removing the invisible tasks that slow teams down.
Visit www.perk.com
The new Perk platform that unites travel and spend management in one seamless, AI-native experience
NEW YORK (AP) — This is not the run-up to the midterm elections that Republicans wanted.
A year and a half after winning the White House by promising to lower costs and end wars, Donald Trump is a wartime president overseeing surging energy costs and an escalating overseas conflict.
The war in Iran was largely unpopular even before an American fighter jet was shot down in Iran, a development that dominated headlines on Friday and contradicted Trump’s claim that Tehran's military capabilities have been all but destroyed. One crew member has been rescued.
Earlier in the week, the Republican president offered little clarity to a nation eager for answers during a prime-time address from the White House, his first since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran more than a month ago, simultaneously suggesting that the war was ending and expanding.
“Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”
Trump's comments come roughly six months before voters across the nation begin to cast ballots in elections that will decide control of Congress and key governorships for Trump’s final two years in office. For now, Republicans, who control all branches of government in Washington, are bracing for a painful political backlash.
“You’re looking at an ugly November,” warned veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. “At a point in time when we need every break possible to hold the House and Senate, our edge is being chipped away.”
It’s hard to overstate how dramatically the political landscape has shifted.
At this time last year, many Republican leaders believed there was a path to preserve their narrow House majority and easily hold the Senate. Now they privately concede that the House is all but lost and Democrats have a realistic shot at taking the Senate.
Republicans are also struggling to coalesce around a clear midterm message on Iran.
The Republican National Committee has largely avoided the war in talking points issued to surrogates over the last month. The leaders of the party's campaign committees responsible for the House and Senate declined interview requests. Many vulnerable Republican candidates sidestep the issue, unwilling to defend or challenge Trump publicly.
The president remains deeply popular with Republican voters, and he has vocal supporters like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
“That was the best speech I could’ve hoped for,” he wrote on social media after Trump's address on Wednesday evening. Graham said Trump “gave the American people a clear and coherent pathway forward.”
Trump made little effort to sell the conflict to Americans before the initial attack. Five weeks later, at least 13 U.S. service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Thousands more troops have converged on the region, and the Pentagon requested $200 billion in new funding.
The Strait of Hormuz, a key passage for a fifth of the world’s oil, remains closed. The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was $4.08 on Thursday, according to AAA, almost a full dollar higher than on President Joe Biden's last day in office.
On Wednesday, Trump insisted that gas prices would fall quickly once the war concluded but offered no solution for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, he invited skeptical U.S. allies to do it themselves.
He insisted that the war would be worth it.
“This is a true investment in your grandchildren and your grandchildren’s future,” Trump said. “When it’s all over, the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous and greater than it has ever been before.”
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who was once among Trump's most vocal allies in Congress, lashed out against his Iran policy.
“I wanted so much for President Trump to put America First. That’s what I believed he would do. All I heard from his speech tonight was WAR WAR WAR,” she wrote on social media. “Nothing to lower the cost of living for Americans.”
About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say the U.S. military action in Iran has “gone too far,” according to AP-NORC polling from March. Roughly a third approve of how he’s handling Iran overall.
The possibility of sending U.S. forces into Iran also appears politically unpalatable.
About 6 in 10 adults are “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to deploying U.S. troops on the ground to fight Iran. That includes about half of Republicans. Only about 1 in 10 favor deploying troops.
At the same time, Trump’s approval ratings have remained consistently weak. About 4 in 10 Americans approve of how he’s handling the presidency, roughly in line with how it’s been throughout his second term.
Republican strategist Ari Fleischer, a senior aide in former President George W. Bush’s administration, acknowledged that Trump has not received the polling bump in this war that Bush got after invading Iraq.
Bush, of course, worked to build public backing for the Iraq War before going in. Immediately after the 2003 invasion, Bush's popularity soared, as did the stock market.
Public sentiment and the economy soured only after the conflict stretched on. It ultimately spanned more than eight years, spawning a generation of anti-war Republicans — and sowing the seeds of Trump's “America First” foreign policy.
“My hope is that the Trump experience is the exact opposite of the Bush experience,” Fleischer said.
He said Trump must win the war decisively and quickly to avoid a further backlash, saying there could be a “very significant political upside if things end well, oil comes down and markets rally.”
Fleischer added that Trump's actions will matter much more than his words.
“Ultimately, he is not going to get judged on his persuasion or his explanations or his assertions, he’s going to get judged on results,” he said.
Associated Press writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
In this image made with a long exposure, President Donald Trump speaks about the Iran war from the Cross Hall of the White House on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)
