Self-Service Business Travel Saves Time and Money

Delays and cancellations can make business travel frustrating for even the most grizzled road warrior. Travelers without the right support waste hours on the phone rebooking flights and finding hotel rooms when they should be focused on the goals of their trip.

When travelers have greater control over their travel, they can focus on the success of their trip instead of stressing over flight delays and itinerary changes.

Here’s how embracing self-service tools for business travelers can boost traveler satisfaction and drive success for your travel program.

Self-service changes and cancellations

Feeling helpless when a flight is delayed, changed, or canceled is the norm for most business travelers. It’s frustrating to wait on the phone or on line at the airport to figure out what is going to happen next, especially when your company uses a Travel Management Company (TMC) that is supposed to help address disruptions.

Research we conducted with the Global Business Travel Association found that more than two-in-three travel managers say wait times for agent support have increased since 2020, with one-third saying wait times are now much longer. It’s more important than ever before to improve life for business travelers by empowering them to make self-service changes and cancellations.

Spotnana’s modern Travel-as-a-Service Platform puts travelers in control of their trip and reduces stress when an itinerary changes. Travelers can use our mobile app and Online Booking Tool to adjust any part of a trip from wherever they are.

With Spotnana, travelers can change trip dates, locations, flights, seats, rooms, cars, loyalty program numbers, TSA numbers, and more – all without having to reach out to an agent for assistance. If there’s a difference in fares or rates, the price change is clearly visible. 

Travelers can compare pricing for different selections when adjusting a flight.

Spotnana’s advanced support for NDC bookings also ensures travelers can make self-service changes and cancellations on NDC flights. Our architecture is designed to support a seamless user experience across all content sources.

It’s our goal to completely automate post-ticketing requests for even the most complex scenarios. We now support, for example, the ability to change or cancel the parts of a multi-leg trip that haven’t happened, even if one or more flights have already been flown. 

When a traveler initiates a change or cancellation through Spotnana’s travel platform, the entire process is automated through our Booking Engine, System of Record, and APIs. Unlike other booking tools, we don’t need to process changes manually behind the scenes.

Spotnana’s modern infrastructure is built to automate traditional manual processes, with our extensible System of Record providing unprecedented flexibility. The traditional mid-office in corporate travel is based on the airline Passenger Name Record (PNR), with comments and passenger information stored in unstructured data attached to the PNR. Making changes to the PNR is an error-prone process that requires extensive manual work by travel agents.

Instead of building a traveler’s booking around an airline PNR, Spotnana incorporates PNRs into a trip container that can hold any number of PNRs and trip elements. Our structured data model enables self-service changes and cancellations by travelers without requiring PNR comments, scripting, or manual quality checks to prevent errors.

This modern approach has benefits for travel managers as well. All change information is captured by Spotnana and available in our real-time analytics dashboard. Policy guidelines are also in effect for travelers who change a flight, so everyone stays in policy even when their plans change or a travel disruption happens. 

Ultimately we want to put the power of a travel agent in the palm of each traveler, so they have the ability to manage all aspects of their trip entirely on their own and can eliminate the need to ever contact an agent if they prefer to do so. 

We believe travelers should reach out to agents only because they want to, not because limitations in an Online Booking Tool or mobile app force them to.

Want to learn more about how Spotnana brings self-service to corporate travel? Get a demo today.