How IDEA Public Schools gets over 87,000 students where they need to go

At IDEA, travel isn’t just a perk—it’s an important part of the student experience. Each year, students participate in field lessons, college visits, athletic tournaments, and Career & Technical Student Organization (CTSO) activities that extend learning beyond the classroom and create meaningful experiences. While some opportunities include student fundraising, others are fully supported by IDEA. Together, these experiences help students explore new opportunities, build connections, and bring their learning to life.

Group travel for students under 18 comes with real operational complexity and no room for error. IDEA relies on Engine across three categories of student travel—campus field lessons for grades 6 and up, extracurricular trips for athletic tournaments, and overnight experiential field trips—all involving minors, with logistical and compliance requirements standard corporate travel tools aren't built to handle. A typical college-visit trip requires ten or more rooms in a single hotel, often with multi-occupancy configurations, and students can't carry individual traveler profiles or handle incidentals the way employees do on traditional platforms.

Before Engine, IDEA’s hotel booking process was largely decentralized, with teams working directly with individual properties to coordinate reservations, contracts, and approvals. As their organization and student travel needs continued to grow, this approach required significant coordination across campus teams, Finance, Legal, and hotel partners.

The pain points stacked up: finding availability for large groups, accommodating specific occupancy configurations, keeping incidentals off students' hands, managing multiple agreements, approval timelines, and maintaining clean tax-exemption records, particularly in Texas. Purchase orders had to be pre-approved, but the exact amount rarely matched final hotel costs once destination fees or breakfast charges came in. School schedules shift constantly, so cancellations and modifications had to be flexible. And travel coordinators, who aren't travel professionals, were managing all of it largely on their own, while a legal team stayed buried under hundreds of hotel contracts a month.

As IDEA’s travel needs evolved, they saw an opportunity to create a process that was simpler, more consistent, and easier to scale. Engine helped to centralize key parts of the hotel booking experience, reduce administrative steps, and provide teams with a more streamlined way to coordinate travel.

Most importantly, the shift allowed their teams to spend less time navigating the logistics behind travel and more time focused on creating meaningful experiences for their students.

IDEA Public Schools has been using Engine since 2024 and has made over 5,100 hotel bookings. Engine's Groups team handles the negotiation and coordination that individual booking tools can't accommodate: room blocks, quad occupancy, charter bus parking, breakfast inclusions, and waived incidentals—the details that make or break a student trip.

Direct Bill consolidated hotel payments under a single account, freeing IDEA's finance team from manually cutting checks to individual hotels and giving them centralized visibility into every travel transaction.

Engine has also become an informal resource for IDEA's travel policy development, including a shared best practice of building a $50-per-night buffer into every purchase order to absorb destination fees and other variable charges.

Today, IDEA's travel coordinators only need to submit a trip request with a location and a purchase order, while Engine's Groups team returns curated hotel options, handles the booking, and manages every detail from there.

$256,000 saved and 100 fewer contracts a month

Hotel booking has become a faster, more streamlined experience for IDEA teams. With a more centralized process, teams can coordinate hotel needs more efficiently, respond to time-sensitive travel, and spend less time navigating administrative steps, keeping the focus on supporting successful student travel experiences.

Over the past two years, IDEA has saved over $256,000. Engine's involvement has also freed IDEA's legal team from hotel contract management entirely, removing more than 100 contracts per month from their workload.

Most importantly, Engine has helped power the college visits and field lessons behind a 27% increase in Tier 1 and Tier 2 college matriculations at IDEA.

“At IDEA Public Schools, serving more than 87,000 students across 143 campuses means creating opportunities for students to see what’s possible for their future. College visits and field lessons are an important part of that experience, especially for students who may be the first in their families to attend college. As our travel needs grew, we needed a process that could grow with us. Engine helped us streamline hotel contracting and coordination, significantly reducing turnaround time and making it easier for our teams to focus on what matters most—getting students on those campuses and creating experiences that make college feel possible,” Martinez adds.