How a two-person team runs global procurement at Tripadvisor with ZoneProcure

Tripadvisor is one of the world’s largest travel research sites, but its procurement process operated without the structure a global company needs. Vendor requests, contract storage, approvals and renewals were handled across disconnected tools and manual processes, leaving the business without a clear system of record. As a result, visibility was limited, handoffs were inconsistent and procurement work depended too heavily on manual coordination.

That created a familiar problem for growing companies. The issue was not just processing requests, it was maintaining control. Without a centralized way to manage intake, contracts and cross-functional approvals, procurement was hard to scale and harder to govern. Tripadvisor needed a top procurement solution that could bring order to that complexity without requiring a large team to maintain it.

The challenge: No system, no visibility

When Freya Hurwitz, Tripadvisor director of procurement, moved into the department seven years ago, there was no system of record, no contract repository and no intake process. She built everything from scratch – a Jira project for ticketing, a Google Drive folder for contracts and a spreadsheet for tracking renewals – all manually maintained.

“Everyone had their own contracts on their own desktops. There was no ticketing feature, so we didn’t know what contracts we needed to work on.”
– Freya Hurwitz, Director of Procurement, Tripadvisor

• No structured intake: Vendor requests were coming in without a consistent submission and routing process, making it harder to control how procurement work entered the business.
• Fragmented contract management: Contracts and renewal details were stored across different locations, limiting the company’s ability to track obligations, ownership and timing.
• Cross-functional approvals were manual: Reviews involving finance, legal and security depended on email coordination rather than a defined workflow, which slowed progress and made handoffs harder to manage.
• Administrative burden outpaced team capacity: Hurwitz became the unintentional gatekeeper of all vendor information for a company with thousands of employees. Every other procurement tool she evaluated required too much administrative overhead for a two-person team.

The solution: AI-powered vendor intake, approvals and management that scales

The team piloted ZoneProcure (formerly Sudozi) with a few departments, collected feedback from legal, finance, and security stakeholders, then rolled out company-wide. The full launch happened roughly three months after the pilot began.

• A guided intake experience for vendor requests: Tripadvisor introduced a standardized way for employees to submit procurement requests, making it easier to capture the right information from the start.
• Custom workflows tailored to different request types: The team configured workflows, forms and approval paths based on the nature of the purchase, including more complex requests that required additional review.
• Embedded collaboration across review teams: Legal, finance, security and other stakeholders could review requests within the same process, rather than working from separate email threads or side conversations.
• Flexible administration without technical lift: Procurement could update workflows, add steps and adjust routing logic on its own, without relying on a heavy implementation model or outside support.

“No one needed any sort of instructions. We put together all these documents for everybody on how to create tickets,” Hurwitz said. “And I don’t think anyone ever looked at any of them because it’s just so intuitive.”

The results: A more controlled and efficient procurement operation

With procurement intake, approvals and contract workflows brought into one process, Tripadvisor was able to reduce friction across the business. Teams had a clearer path for getting requests reviewed and the procurement team had better control over what was coming in and where it stood. The result was a process that was easier to manage and better suited for scale.

Features that drove the most value include:

• AI prompts: AI prompts run in real time as requests come in. Tripadvisor uses them for vendor comparison and duplicate detection – automatically flagging when an existing approved tool already covers a new request. Unlike a separate ChatGPT tab, these agents have full context: contract history, department ownership and historical spend from ERP data.
• Workflows, forms and ad-hoc steps: Approval workflows are fully self-configurable. Tripadvisor uses conditional nested forms for AI compliance questionnaires and business cases greater than $500K. When unexpected needs arise, Hurwitz inserts ad-hoc steps into any active workflow without reconfiguring the process.
• Renewals and contract intelligence: Renewal reminders are configured per contract based on actual lead time needed. AI extracts service details and renewal clauses from order forms, structuring pricing and terms automatically. Notifications route via Slack to business owners.

With AI tool requests surging, Tripadvisor built dedicated request types with ZoneProcure that route free AI tools directly to legal and compliance – bypassing procurement entirely. Their IT team blocks unapproved AI tools on corporate devices and uses ZoneProcure as the source of truth.

“Procurement doesn’t care – it’s free,” Hurwitz said of the feature to route free AI tools directly to legal and compliance teams. “But that doesn’t mean there’s no risk to the company. There’s potentially more risk because we’re probably operating under their standard terms.”

Make procurement frictionless and built to scale with ZoneProcure

For Tripadvisor, the value was in giving procurement a system that could support cross-functional review, adapt quickly to new requirements and stay manageable for a lean team operating at global scale.

If procurement is becoming harder to track, govern or scale, the problem may not be volume alone. Book a demo to explore how ZoneProcure helps teams simplify intake, approvals and contract management in one connected process.