Easy supplier and travel restriction management

For global and growing travel programs, it can be complicated to ensure travelers are booking with the right suppliers. If your travel platform doesn’t allow you to highlight your preferred suppliers, your program is likely spending more on travel while your travelers are missing out on amenities.

The reverse is also true – if your travel platform doesn’t give you the flexibility to restrict bookings for specific suppliers and travelers, or prevent travel to specific countries, you are likely increasing the risk of safety issues and poor traveler experiences.

At Spotnana, our goal is to arm travel managers with the tools to build an exceptional travel program. Here are two new features that streamline travel and user restrictions for global travel programs.

Preferred supplier management

Travel programs often want travelers to book with preferred suppliers to receive better pricing and negotiated amenities. Sometimes travelers need a little guidance when booking, though, to reinforce they’re not only doing the right thing but receiving benefits in the process.

For some time, administrators using Spotnana have been able to designate which suppliers are preferred and have those suppliers appear near the top of search results with a preferred label. Now administrators can also assign preferred suppliers to one of three tiers. 

Tiering gives administrators greater control over supplier management for airlines, hotel properties, hotel brands, and car rental brands. The tiers impact search results and signal to travelers which suppliers are more preferred than others. 

Travel managers can now assign a preferred supplier as Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3. This allows you to ensure your travelers know which suppliers are preferred by tier during their shopping experience in the Spotnana platform. 

It’s easy to select which suppliers your travelers see as preferred.

In addition, administrators can now personalize the tier naming by assigning a custom label to each tier. For example, administrators can name Tier 1 “Gold,” Tier 2 “Silver,” and Tier 3 “Bronze” to reflect the order in which you’d like travelers to select from available choices.

Suppliers in preferred tiers are displayed clearly when travelers search.

Preferred suppliers can also be assigned based on a traveler’s legal entity or the country they are traveling to, ensuring that travelers see the preferred options for every trip based on the parameters of their travel program.

Managing travel restrictions 

There are many reasons companies restrict travelers from booking certain types of trips. A country may be deemed as a safety risk, for instance, or may not be a location where a company can operate their business.

Travelers, however, don’t always know which countries are restricted and why, leading to confusion.

Now restricted travel options will appear grayed out, include a label that indicates the travel option can’t be booked, and provide travelers with a reason why. This is a more transparent way to restrict travel that helps build traveler trust in the corporate booking tool.

Mid-size and enterprise companies often have multiple legal entities in many countries with differing rules of business and duty of care. It’s one thing to reflect the complexity of these rules in a lengthy travel policy, and another to enforce the rules in a seamless way that doesn’t interrupt the flow of booking for travelers. To make policies actionable, Spotnana now provides granular controls allowing restrictions to be applied to specific legal entities.

Spotnana’s Booking Restrictions page also now features our existing country-level restrictions alongside a new section for restricting individual users. Groups of users that need to be restricted can be defined by individual users or entire legal entities. We have also included a rich text editor to provide travelers with custom reasons for being unable to book, reminding travelers of the rules of their travel policy.

It’s simple to restrict travelers from booking trips to selected countries.

Since Spotnana is a global Travel-as-a-Service platform with agents, administrators, arrangers, and agents all on one platform, restrictions are implemented instantly and enforced consistently for all travelers wherever they are in the world.

Want to learn more? Get a demo of Spotnana today.