Scaling Impact Through Smarter Travel: Build Health International's ITILITE Journey

Build Health International (BHI), a non-profit, sends teams to build hospitals in some of the world's most remote corners, but their travel process was a major challenge. They realized they needed to organize their travel and expense processes when manual tracking in spreadsheets made grant reporting nearly impossible, and unreliable travel support created critical issues.

They were extremely delighted to find a single platform that could handle complex bookings to remote locations and ensure every trip was tied to a specific project code. This not only made their reporting seamless but also gave their travelers access to fast, reliable human support that could handle last-minute changes in just a few clicks.

They were able to achieve 100% project-level spend mapping, ensure human support in under 15 seconds, and so much more. Here's how.

Coordinating BHI's travel falls to one person: Charlotte Dibb, the organization's Travel Coordinator. With a background in global affairs and a passport that tells its own story, Charlotte has spent years bringing order to one of the more chaotic corners of running a global non-profit, travel logistics for teams working across 20+ simultaneous projects in places like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Kyrgyzstan.

It's a job with very little margin for error. A delayed flight or a missed connection doesn't just inconvenience a traveler; it can push back a construction timeline that's been months in the planning. And because BHI's projects are funded through grants and partner reimbursements, every trip also has to be accounted for in a way that satisfies funders who want to see exactly how their money was spent. Travel, in other words, sits at the intersection of two things BHI can't afford to get wrong: people getting where they need to go, and money being tracked precisely enough to keep the funding relationships that make the work possible.

At a Glance

• Industry: Non-Profit (Healthcare) 
• Headquarters: Beverly, Massachusetts 
• Employees: 141

Results after switching to ITILITE:

• 100% of travel spend mapped at the project level
• 2x increase in platform adoption among travelers
• Under 15 seconds to reach a live human support agent

Before ITILITE, BHI was managing all of this with spreadsheets, despite travel being one of the organization's largest expense categories. Team members booked flights and hotels across whatever websites worked for their route, and Charlotte was left trying to reconcile receipts after the fact and match them to the right project. For an organization that needs clean documentation to satisfy grant reporting requirements, this was more than an inconvenience, it directly affected BHI's ability to demonstrate to partners and funders how money was being used. Three problems in particular kept surfacing.

Problem One: No Way to Tie Spend to Projects

Without a system that captured project codes at the point of booking, Charlotte had no reliable way to answer a basic question: how much did this specific project spend on travel? Reconstructing that picture meant manually piecing together bookings from multiple sources, different airlines, different hotel sites, different receipts in different formats and then matching each one to a project after the fact. That process ate hours every reporting cycle and left plenty of room for error in exactly the kind of documentation that grant funders scrutinize most closely.

The stakes went beyond Charlotte's own workload. BHI relies on accurate financial reporting to maintain trust with the partners and grant-makers funding its projects. If travel costs couldn't be cleanly tied to the right initiative, BHI risked under-documenting expenses it was entitled to be reimbursed for, or over-attributing costs to the wrong project entirely. Either outcome made the organization's financial picture less reliable at exactly the moment funders expect more transparency, not less.

ITILITE's fix was straightforward but effective: travelers now have to enter a project code before any trip is confirmed. That one step means every booking is automatically tied to the right initiative from the moment it's made, rather than being reconstructed weeks or months later. Reporting became project-focused by default, so Charlotte can pull total spend for any of BHI's 20+ active projects in a matter of minutes instead of hours, and hand over clean, defensible numbers whenever a grant justification is due.

As Charlotte puts it, project-level reporting has become her go-to source of truth for tracking how travel dollars map back to BHI's work on the ground.

Problem Two: A Support Team That Couldn't Keep Up

BHI's travel isn't predictable. Engineers and architects head to offbeat locations for extended stretches, and itineraries change on short notice as project needs shift, a delayed shipment of materials, a security update, a permit that comes through later than expected. That kind of travel demands a support team that can move fast and understands the stakes involved. BHI's previous travel management agency wasn't built for it. Special requests and last-minute changes were routinely mishandled, often at the moments when reliability mattered most. Over time, that pattern eroded trust between Charlotte's team and the agency entirely, to the point where travelers stopped expecting help to actually arrive when they needed it.

That breakdown in trust had real consequences. When travelers don't believe support will come through, they either spend their own time troubleshooting problems mid-trip, time that should be going toward the project they're there for or they escalate every minor hiccup to Charlotte directly, which pulled her away from the bigger-picture work of running BHI's travel program.

Charlotte went looking for an alternative herself, testing several travel management providers before landing on ITILITE, drawn by its reputation for global support that actually delivers. Now, when a trip needs to change or a traveler runs into a snag, reaching a live person takes just a few clicks and BHI's data backs that up, with human support consistently available in under 15 seconds. The support desk also handles complex offline bookings directly, which matters for travelers who'd rather talk to a person than navigate a self-serve tool for a complicated itinerary, especially when they're juggling time zones and unreliable connectivity on-site. The result isn't just faster resolutions; it's a support relationship the team can actually depend on during mission-critical trips, freeing Charlotte from being the de facto backup support line for every travel issue that comes up.

Problem Three: Remote Routes That Standard Tools Couldn't Handle

The third challenge was specific to where BHI works. Booking travel to places like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Kyrgyzstan routinely broke down under BHI's old setup. Online booking tools simply didn't surface relevant options for these routes, and the travel agents on the other end couldn't find competitive rates either. The result was a familiar cycle: delays, inflated costs, and project timelines slipping because travel couldn't be locked in on schedule. For an organization where every trip is tied to a construction milestone, a flight that can't be booked isn't just an inconvenience, it's a project risk.

ITILITE's global inventory changed that calculus. Charlotte and her team gained access to a far broader set of booking options in one place, which meant most trips, even to BHI's most remote destinations, could be booked without needing to escalate to support at all. When something did require a human touch, the issue was resolved quickly by people equipped to handle it, rather than bounced between agents who didn't know the route. That consistency, trip after trip, is what eventually rebuilt the confidence that had been lost with BHI's previous provider, and gave travelers one less thing to worry about before heading into the field.

What Changed, in Charlotte's Words

"We have 20+ simultaneous projects with non-profits. Tracking travel spend accurately at a project level is crucial for us, since we get reimbursed from our partners and through grants. Through ITILITE, project-level reporting has been seamless and it has become my go-to tool for getting this information."

That sentiment captures what shifted for BHI: travel management stopped being a source of friction and started being something Charlotte could rely on, whether she was preparing a grant report or fielding a last-minute change request from a traveler halfway across the world.

The Outcome

Three numbers sum up the shift for BHI. Travel spend is now mapped to specific projects 100% of the time, removing the guesswork from grant reporting and giving Charlotte a level of financial clarity that simply didn't exist with spreadsheets. Platform adoption among travelers doubled, a sign that the tool actually fit how BHI's teams work in the field rather than adding another layer of friction on top of an already demanding job. And support response times dropped to under 15 seconds, turning what used to be a point of frustration and a source of distrust, into one of the platform's biggest wins for the people relying on it most.

What's notable is how these three results reinforce each other. Better reporting only matters if travelers actually use the platform consistently, and travelers only adopt a platform consistently if they trust the support behind it. BHI's experience suggests that fixing the support and reliability problems first is part of what made the project-level reporting gains possible, travelers weren't working around the system anymore, so the data it captured became complete enough to be useful.

For an organization whose real work happens on construction sites in low-resource settings, the value of getting travel right isn't abstract. It's fewer hours lost to spreadsheets, fewer dollars unaccounted for when funders ask questions, and fewer disruptions to projects that are, ultimately, about getting healthcare infrastructure built for the communities that need it most.

Managing travel across multiple projects, grants, or remote locations? Request a demo to see how ITILITE can give your team the same level of visibility and support BHI relies on.

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